Ant build file documentation generation, that can resolve task and target inheritance

["Daniels, Doug" <Do...@GDC4S.Com>]

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone knew of any good Ant build file document
generators that can handle Ant 1.6 <import> task and target inheritance? I
looked on the Apache Ant external tools page and found this tool:
http://antdoc.free.fr/index.php

download it from here:
http://antdoc.free.fr/AntDoc/

This tool doesn't handle 1.6's new features such as the <import...> task and
target inheritance. This is very important to me as I've constructed a
relatively complex build process using inheritance to create a reusable
build process that other projects at my company can then simple inherit from
the abstract base builds, implement the necessary targets (like a java
interface) and then can use the base targets already written. It would be
nice to be able to generate some documentation from the ant build files, so
that new projects could easily understand how the whole build process is and
how they can use it for their projects.

I've also found a really good tool that can visual render your build files
as dependency graphs.
GRAND:
http://www.ggtools.net/grand/

This tool supports Ant 1.6 and its <import> task and handles target
inheritance etc. It does all this because it uses the Ant API as opposed to
just parsing the build file as XML. It then looks at the target properties
read in by Ant and builds the graphs by using that. So there's an idea for
an Ant documentation generation tool, maybe someone can make a tool that
uses the Ant API to create the build file documentation, maybe even
integrate it with GRAND? 


~ Doug Daniels


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