Apache Ivy 2.0 Final Released

by R.J. Lorimer on Feb 08, 2009 |

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.

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Community comments

In a nutshell... by Bruno Borges Posted

Re: In a nutshell... by Aaron Korver Posted

Loving Ivy by John Hurst Posted

In a nutshell... by Bruno Borges

What is the difference between using Ivy and Maven?

Re: In a nutshell... by Aaron Korver

Ivy = Dependency Manager. No more than that, no less than that.
Maven = Archetype based build system that also does dependency management.

Personally, I prefer Ivy because I feel it does dependency management better than Maven. I'm sure others will disagree with me and say they are equal or that maven does a better job.

In the end, if you have invested time/effort to learn maven and are over the learning curve it has, then I probably wouldn't add Ivy to the mix. However, if your build is an Ant build and you want to add dependency management, then I would reach for Ivy before trying to convert it to Maven.

Loving Ivy by John Hurst

We switched from doing manual dependency management to Ivy (using beta and RC 2.0 versions) over the last couple of months. We have a number of Java projects in an enterprise environment. We use Ant and are pretty happy with it. The combination of Ivy and Ant works really well.

My next step is to put Grapes (groovy.codehaus.org/Grape) to work with our Groovy scripts.

John Hurst