Interactive graphical views of your Ant build files give you more information faster, reduce errors, and provide intuitive methods to help you comprehend, modify, and test build targets.
by Michael Sorens
October 10, 2007
have always been fascinated by informational graphics. Mathematicians aside, most people find properly rendered information graphics easier to assimilate and quicker to understand than raw data, in whatever form that raw data may come in. This article applies concepts of data visualization to source code—not to what typically first comes to mind as source code (e.g. Java, C#, etc.) but rather the source code of an Ant build file.
Build files are notorious for being difficult to create, maintain, and understand, but you'll see a variety of techniques for visualizing or rendering an Ant file—some textual and some graphical—that will simplify the creation, maintenance, and comprehension of your build files.
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have always been fascinated by informational graphics. Mathematicians aside, most people find properly rendered information graphics easier to assimilate and quicker to understand than raw data, in whatever form that raw data may come in. This article applies concepts of data visualization to source code—not to what typically first comes to mind as source code (e.g. Java, C#, etc.) but rather the source code of an Ant build file.
