Apache Ant is a pure-Java build tool that made quite a splash in its day, and did a great job superseding the Make tools. Do people still use Ant? Many have moved to Maven or Gradle, but Ant has been around long enough that some projects have built quite complex structures of targets. XML files that stretch into several hundreds of lines long, with calls and dependencies, can make understanding the Ant build script difficult enough, and maintaining it all the more challenging. Any time I have had to modify a complex build file, I would start by sketching the targets and their relationships. This Eclipse plug-in does all that tracing and sketching for us, by creating a visual representation of the targets and their links. Much simpler and faster!
Musings on Tests, Quality, Tools, Projects and more. By Steve Page