Related link: http://www.ericburke.com

What started out as a quick and dirty hack is, well, a little better. AntGraph uses an XSLT stylesheet to convert any Ant buildfile into a “dot” file, which is then converted into a GIF image using Graphviz from ATT labs.

This new release fixes two bugs, one of which was reported by Jeff Brown, the creator of JarSpy. Specifically, I was not quoting target names when charting antcall tasks, so Ant targets containing “.” characters confused Graphviz.

While fixing the bugs, I added some unit tests so hopefully the bugs won’t resurface in future releases.

I’m a little curious about JGraph and JGraphpad, which are pure-Java graphing toolkits. Although Graphviz works great, it is not written in Java which makes it slightly harder to integrate into Java tools like AntGraph. If I modified AntGraph to use JGraph, I could include a few extra JAR files in the download and it would work on any platform. As it stands now, you are responsible for downloading a platform-specific release of Graphviz before you can use AntGraph.

At any rate, my time is pretty limited these days so I’ll probably leave AntGraph as-is. Hopefully people will find it to be a useful little utility.

Let me know if you are using AntGraph or would like to see some new feature.