Visualizing Ant Scripts.

XML is generally not only tedious to write, but also hideous to look at, yet sometimes you gotta bite the bullet and use an ant build script.

I’ve written a little tool that renders a dependancy graph of all the tasks in a ant build.xml file. The result looks like this:

ant_deps

The above was generated from this xml file which is too long and ugly to include here.

In case you’d also like to generate nifty little pictures like the above, to beef up skimpy documentation, for example, you can download the tool here. Just call:

java -jar antvis.jar

And all the rest should be self-explanatory. You’ll need to have a copy of Graphviz installed in order to render the pictures. In case you are interested in the source, you can grab a copy using subversion here:

svn co http://a2800276.googlecode.com/svn/branches/antvis

One Response to “Visualizing Ant Scripts.”

  1. […] I’ve written a small update to my ant-file visualization tool. The only visible change is that the default task is now marked in the output. […]