Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Ant Build Tools

One of the biggest challenges we face when doing continuous integration is the amount of time it takes to complete a build. If you find yourself waiting 10 minutes for a build to complete its probably a sign that something is wrong with your build process. Here are a few interesting tools to help working with your build, keep in mind that I have not used them all, only that I thought they sounded interesting.

Profiler
This is a good first step. I used this to help us quickly narrow down targets
http://antutility.dev.java.net/

Grand
Not too many tools out there provide a graphical representation of build dependencies. I would bet that if you used this tool, you might notice that your build looks either like a spider web or spaghetti.
http://www.ggtools.net/grand/

Ant-Junit
Eric Lee turned me on to this. I thought it looked promising.
http://www.jinspired.com/products/jxinsight/antjunittracing.html

Build anti-patterns
Interesting blog posting about poor performing ant tasks.
http://jroller.com/eu/date/20050516#profiling_and_statical_analysis_of

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