Developer Break: Ant 1.9, LLVM IR SDK and Git 1.8.2

Developer Break – catch up on the smaller but important notes for developers, from libraries to APIs and from people to postings. In this edition: Apache Ant, Play support in NetBeans, an LLVM IR plugin for Eclipse, App Engine, GWT, asynchronous tasks in Xamarin, and a new version of Git.

• Apache Ant 1.9, the latest major release of the Java build tool, has become available, three years after the last major release. Ant now requires at least Java 1.5 and works with Java 8; it has an upgraded JUnit and pays attention to tests marked @ignore, and, thanks to Commons Compress, can handle archives bigger than 4GB.
  

• When Google's App Engine was launched in 2008, Python 2.5 was the default platform. As Python 2.7 has been supported for a year, it's time to say good-bye to Python 2.5, which has now been marked as deprecated on Google's platform.
  

• Less than six months after version 2.5 of Google's Web Toolkit was released, GWT 2.5.1 has been published as the first maintenance release, fixing various bugs and introducing minor new features.
  

• LLVM IR SDK is Intel's new LLVM IR plugin for the Eclipse development environment. It offers Eclipse's editing capabilities, including syntax highlighting, occurrence marking and definitions on hover, but is currently still in beta state.
  

• The nbplay plugin now offers development support for the Play Scala framework from within the NetBeans 7.3 development environment.
  

• Version 1.3 of Spring Data GemFire includes various features that make it easier for Java developers to use the GemFire in-memory database; among these features are annotation support for executing functions and the support of namespaces.
  

• In a just-released preview of its developer libraries for creating iOS and Android apps with the Mono framework, Xamarin demonstrates how to use the asynchronous language features that were introduced with .NET 4.5.

• Junio C Hamano has released Git 1.8.2, including commits from over 1,200 contributors. New features include improved command line completion, with git add having learned which files actually have changes and make sense to be added, and the /**/ pattern being available in .gitignore files (allowing users to match multiple levels of directories).
  

(fab)