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Are there any tools available that allow the cleanup of a ant script?

I especially need to remove unecessary jar files... The Ant script I have to clean has more than 500 entries and has grown uncrontrolled over time.

Chris
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    How would this tool know which are the `unnecessary` jar files that needs to be removed? – Raghuram Jan 17 '11 at 12:17
  • I suppose it could load the main java file and determine which external jars are needed and which are not. – Chris Jan 17 '11 at 12:19
  • See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/475516/how-to-determine-which-classes-are-used-by-a-java-program - Proguard or similar might help you to determine what's in use. But if you have over 500 jars, the task might be hard. It's not possible to determine the set of classes that might be used in all cases just by analysis of the code . In addition, classes may be loaded during run time and these may not become apparent in a simple test run. – martin clayton Jan 17 '11 at 16:05

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There's no automated way of cleaning up jar files. You can look at the various include statements in your Java code, but they merely mention classes to include and not the jar themselves. Even if you can determine that a particular class is served by jarA.jar, it could be that jarA.jar is dependent upon jarB.jar.

You can even start removing jar files one at a time to see what breaks your build. That can be somewhat automated, especially if you specify your classpath via fileset instead of each specific jar. However, what if you actually need a jar for runtime, and not for the build?

My suggestion is to use Ant with Ivy. Ivy gives you the same Maven jar dependency capabilities without converting your project to Maven.

Take a look at Ivy and see how it works with Ant. Then, if possible, ask your developers to determine exactly what jars they need and what versions of those jars they need. You will have to help them. You might have to go through the jars in your repository and attempt to figure out what versions of the jars are in your repository.

You don't have to worry about jars that other jars depend upon. Ivy will take care of that for you. What you simply need are the jars that your developers depend upon, and they should know because they're the ones who use the include statements in their programs to specify a particular dependency.

Once you've determined the primary jars (and revisions) you need, you can easily convert your build.xml files to take advantage of Ivy's jar dependency system. Once you've done that, you can remove all the jars from your source repository since Ant with Ivy will download the required ones from the Internet based Maven repository system.

David W.
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