Ivy 2.0, the next version in the Ivy project dependency manager, has been released.
Key features of the 2.0.0 release are
- enhanced Maven2 compatibility, with several bug fixes and more pom features covered
- improved cache management, including dynamic revision caching with fine grain TTL
- improved concurrency support with cache locking and atomic publish
- namespace aware validation, allowing to use validation with extra attributes
- new 'packager' resolver added
- better and more homogeneous relative paths handling
- better support for local builds
- numerous bug fixes as documented in Jira and in the release notes
Apache Ivy is a tool for managing project dependencies. The Apache website further defines Ivy in these ways:
1. flexibility and configurability
Apache Ivy is essentially process agnostic and is not tied to any methodology or structure. Instead it provides the necessary flexibility and configurability to be adapted to a broad range of dependency management and build processes.
2. tight integration with Apache Ant
While available as a standalone tool, Apache Ivy works particularly well with Apache Ant providing a number of powerful Ant tasks ranging from dependency resolution to dependency reporting and publication.
The 2.0 release of Ivy has been a long time coming, after starting the effort with the move to an official Apache project over a year ago. There are a number of other changes in 2.0 beyond those mentioned above:
- Moved to a org.apache package structure.
- Naming convention changes related to Apache move
- 'Configuration' renamed to 'Settings'
- Defaults to Maven ibiblio repository
- Improved Ant integration
Ivy can be downloaded from the Apache Ivy home page. More information about how to use Ivy, and what features it provides are available in the 2.0 documentation.