eclipseant2dot

This is a plugin for Eclipse that helps visualize ant files by generating a graph that shows the dependencies between ant targets. See the snapshots below for details. eclipseant2dot is released under the GNU Public License.

Prerequisites

Installation instructions

Usage and snapshots

Ant2Dot

Contributions and contact


Prerequisites

Eclipse 3.2 or above
Java 1.6
GraphViz

Installation
1. eclipseant2dot requires your Eclipse program to run on Java 1.6. If you don't have Java 1.6, you can download it from Sun's website

2. Install the free GraphViz program. The setup file is not more than 15 MB,

http://www.graphviz.org

3. It is recommended that you install this plugin using the software update option in Eclipse. Add the following URL to your site list and give it the name,

eclipseant2dot

and the URL,

http://eclipseant2dot.ertale.com/update

4. Make sure that the "dot" command is in your current path. To check this you can open a terminal in linux and a command prompt in Windows and type,

dot -version

If this shows some information that has "graphviz" somewhere then you need not worry.

If you get some other output then you need to change your path variable in such a way that the dot executable from graphviz is executed. You can normally do this by adding the graphviz bin directory at the beginning of your PATH variable. See below on how to do this.

If the command could not be found, you need to add the graphviz bin directory to your path. In Windows XP,

Right click on My Computer > Properties > Advanced > Environment Variables > Under "System Variables" box, find the "PATH" variable and add the Graphviz bin directory. For example, for Graphviz2.22 the default path is C:\Program Files\Graphviz2.22\bin. Replace this path by your path.

You will follow a more or less similar approach in other Windows operating systems.

If you are using Linux, you can edit your .bashrc file to add the Graphviz bin directory to your path.

5. Since eclipseant2dot generates jpg files, you need a program that opens this file type. It is very unlikely that you will need to worry about this.

6. Restart Eclipse.

Usage and snapshots

Right click on an ant file > Ant2Dot > View graph.

Click here to see how you invoke eclipseant2dot and here to see an example output.

Images are stored in temporary directories such as C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp or /tmp.

Ant2Dot

eclipseant2dot is based on the opensource project Ant2Dot. Many thanks to Peter Vandenberk for developing the stylesheet that generates dot files for ant scripts!

Contributions and contact

This is an opensource project and it is hosted at eclipseant2dot.sourceforge.net

Please send bug reports, comments, feature requests and or any other issues to tilaye+eclipseant2dot@gmail.com