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I've been having a few problems with some JUnit tests recently. They would run fine through IDEA, but would cause the JVM to hang whenever they were executed through an Ant build script. As a workaround, I just used the fork property of the junit task so that the tests would run in a separate JVM. This did the trick but slowed test execution down substantially.

In trying to solve this, I bought up the current documentation for the junit task and saw that v1.6 introduced a new reloading property. By default, the junit task creates a new classloader for each test case and this new property allows you to configure this behaviour. Now my tests work again and they're much, much faster. A handy little feature that passed me by.