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02.09.10 Taking Your XML From Visualization To Reality  By Sean Corfield I've spent today working on a reasonably complex build.xml file, refactoring it to reduce duplication by using the ant-contrib foreach task so that similar targets can be reduced to loops over a list of properties (I'll blog on that later since it includes some fancy nested loops to run Selenium tests across multiple applications on a server). I wanted a way to look at the structure of the ant file before I did open-heart surgery on it. Google led me to ant2dot and GraphViz (with a very nice version for Mac OS X and the iPhone). It's a very neat way to quickly get a handle on the dependencies in your ant file and it's certainly helped me figure out how to reorganize things. My only complaint would be that it doesn't understand the ant-contrib foreach task which has a target attribute and therefore creates a dependency so such children appear as orphans. I figured I'd blog this in case anyone else finds it useful! Comments About the Author: Sean is currently Senior Computer Scientist and Team Lead in the Hosted Services group at Adobe Systems Incorporated. He has worked in the IT industry for nearly twenty-five years, first in database systems and compilers (serving eight years on the ANSI C++ Standards Committee), then in mobile telecoms, and finally in web development. Sean is a staunch advocate of software standards and best practices, and is a well-known and respected speaker on these subjects. Sean has championed and contributed to a number of ColdFusion frameworks, and is a frequent publisher on his blog, http://corfield.org/ |
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