Lean build cycles with antro

Antro was released last week onto SF under GPLv3. It is a kind of visualisation tool for the performance of an ant build. It gives you colour coded drill down into your build and its files, red means long running, green means quick.



And I expected it to be just another tool that works for simple examples but never for the real thing, like so many other promising ideas. And as it was so simple to use I decided to give it a chance to shine.

Simple to use the nice part here, you just add a listener and the jar to your ant command line (or drop the jar into the ant/lib folder). Run your script and then open up the UI on the output json file. If liked the way I did not have to touch my build.xml files.

It worked on my complex build (i.e. long depends tree and heavy use of antcall etc.). And I was able to see a number of interesting 'features' of my build and then shave 10% off its cycle time. So this one gets used again.

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