sharing a visualization of the ant build.xml dependency structure
 

Our team was trying to write a custom target in the NetBeans build.xml. Since there were so many targets in the sunspot build.xml it calls, it was making my heads spin thinking about the interactions. So I turned it into a visual dependency graph.

Sharing in case anyone else is reading the xml:

• PDF showing all the targets and their dependencies. (This is a really tiny font, you need to zoom in and scroll around.)

• Blog post on how I created this.

Ant terminology for anyone reading this who is confused:

• build.xml - the name of the file containing instructions on how to build/package/deploy the java code

• target - kind of like a method except in XML and it gets called differently

• sunspot build.xml - comes with the plugins - has many targets and calls/includes other xml files with even more targets

Re: sharing a visualization of the ant build.xml dependency structure
 

Whoa - that huge column gets impossible to follow!

What is your goal in doing this? In the preseason I tried to edit the build.xml so that we could have a process for deploying code that had already been built without recompiling it. I ended up leaving the file as is because I wasn't getting anywhere and I was causing strange errors.

Is your goal somewhat similar?

The team is working on a simulator to run code without having a robot. (virsysj which is a java port). The idea is to right click the robot and either deploy to the robot or the simulator. Hence reading the Ant stuff. We didn't really need the visualization. I wanted to see it anyway.

One key is we DID NOT touch their build.xml. We only touvhed the build.xml for our robot project. Which imports the monstor file in the visualization. I heavily used zooming to read the file though.