Java 1.5 comes with support for a new archive format Pack200[1] which basically works by using a special compression algorithm that is very effective on Java class files. The way to create such an archive is to create a plain old jar first and then turn ot into a Pack200 archive - "depack200"ing again yields a jar archive.
Sine Java 1.5 comes with a straight forward utility class[2], creating <pack200> and <unpack200> tasks would be quite simple - and first enhancement request are predicted to pop up soon 8-)
Do we want to make them core tasks or do we want to farm them out into an antlib of their own?
Stefan
Footnotes: [1] http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=200
[2] http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/javax/pack/Pack200.html
Because its based only on (new) standard classes I would do that as core tasks. And as an adoption of <jar>, so the user doesn´t has to create the JAR bofore "pack200"ing.
"core tasks" would be the right solution if it could be implemented using JDK1.3 ( or even 1.4 ), or at very least use introspection.
I'm kind of -1 for conditional compilation ( which would force ant to be built with 1.5 beta ).
It would be really nice to have pack200 implemented in 1.3, both packer and unpacker/class loader - it would reduce the size of our code and make this cool feature available _now_ and to everyone. I hate when Sun
bundles features with JDK ( like logging, NIO ) in order to force adoption, hurting the new feature and existing users who can't benefit from them, and eventually the standard itself, since alternative solutions supporting current VMs are more likely to be adopted instead.
Costin
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