sharing a visualization of the ant build.xml dependency structure

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

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

[Patrickwhite]

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?

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

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.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

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.