JarPatch ANT Task 0.6

Description

JarPatch is an ANT task (and standalone utility) that allow to build a diff zip file which contains the difference between 2 jar or war files (named newJar and oldjar). The diff file consist of:

all ressources defined on the newjar and not defined on the oldJar,
all ressources defined on the oldJar that have been modified on the newJar. Modified ressources are determined by MD5 hash computing.

This diff file can be use as a patch for a previous installation (just ensure that the generated patch.zip file is located on the CLASSPATH before the patched oldJar jar file).

The task has been tested using ANT 1.5.4 and ANT 1.6.2.

Download

Download jarpatch distribution: jarpatch-0.6.zip
it contains the compiled jarpatch.jar and all source/test stuff.

Installation

The easiest way is to include jarpatch-0.6.jar on the $ANT_HOME/lib directory.

To use the task in a build file, you will need the following taskdef declaration:

  <taskdef name="jarpatch" classname="org.jarpatch.JarPatchTask"/>

Alternatively, you can specify the jarpatch location with the classpath attribute:

  <taskdef name="jarpatch" classname="org.jarpatch.JarPatchTask" 
        classpath="c:/somewhere/jarpatch.jar"/>

Parameters

Attribute	Description	Required
newJar	The new jar file, that define new or modified ressource	Yes
oldJar	The old jar file, that is the reference to know which ressource are new or modified	Yes
resultPatch	The resulting zip file, containing the new and modified ressources	Yes
excludes	a comma separate list of regex pattern (JDK1.4 syntax)	No
logDeleteFile	(Boolean) if true then add a file `jarpatch_deleted.log` on the resultPatch, that contains the list of files that are found in oldJar but not in newJar (one line by file)	No

Examples

Run jarpatch to generate a patch from a 2 jar, excluding images ressources

   <jarpatch newJar="${build}.lib/${app.jar}" oldjar="${dist}/lib/${app.jar}"
         resultPatch="${dist}/patch/patch-${build.number}.zip" excludes=".*\.gif, .*\.jpg"/>

Same, but called as a standalone utility

   java -jar jarpatch.jar -new myNew.jar -old myOld.jar -out myPatch.zip -excludes .*\.gif,.*\.jpg

License

jarPatch is licensed with the LGPL license, meaning that is free and open source, and can be used for commercial projects.

API Documentation

Javadoc API documentation is available here.

History

0.3 (2004): initial public release
0.4 (2007-05-14): manage jar inside another zip (like EAR or WAR) : contribution from Shawn Ellis
0.5 (2007-08-18): add an optional log describing removed files : contribution from Kristopher Hall
0.6 (2008-03-03): fix command line parsing bug : contribution from Alexandre Vasseur

Feedback to Norbert Barbosa