The Apache Ant project, whose main purpose is the building of Java applications, has been updated to version 1.8.0 on February 8.

This update brings a number of enhancements to Ant, including a big speed improvement in certain cases caused by changes to the directory scanning code, better support for URL- and text-providing resources for data importation and proper handling of the if and unless attributes, in addition to a number of overall bug fixes (you can see the Apache Ant 1.8.0 release notes here).

The new release requires Java 1.4 and can be downloaded directly from the Ant website in either source of binary form.

For a PHP project build system that uses Apache Ant, check out Phing, originally developed by Andreas Aderhold for the Binarycloud project.