Documenting Ant Scripts

I’ve had some fun evenings over the last week writing some documentation for the Ant Script Library. And by “fun“, I actually mean “tedious“. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is needed when you’re writing build files that are intended for a wider audience.

So far, I’ve managed to write some fairly complete documentation for the asl-java-build.xml module, but there’s still a long way to go for the other modules. In writing these, I’ve discovered some pretty neat tools: yEd and KImageMapEditor. yEd makes it trivial to read in an Ant build file and generate a dependency diagram, while KImageMapEditor makes it a snap to add links without having to break up the diagrams. This is probably old hat to a number of people out there, but I’ve found it very interesting to catch up on these tools.