Alexandria makes heavy use of XSL transformations in it's build process. Starting from the global.xml file it will perform multiple XSL transformations and Ant builds to produce a each Alexandria page.

Alexandria uses Ant to do the hard work. It does this by creating several build files each of which is responsible for a different area of the build.

• build.cvs.xml - build file for retrieving files from CVS.
• build.build.xml - build file for building projects.
• build.javadoc.xml - build file for creating JavaDoc.
• build.test.xml - build file for running JUnit tests.

JXR is run as an Ant task. It will look through all the source code directories defined in the global.xml file and produce a single cross referenced set of pages which can then be used to navigated though the source code.

The blame system is used to try and identify code which is causing the build of a module to fail. It will examine the output of the build file used to build the module and attempt to identify the change which is causing the problem and who was responsible for making the change. This enables the root of the problem to be identified quickly and an corrections made.

It should be noted that the code which is identified as breaking the build may not be the root of the problem. It it merely a symptom e.g. If an interface is changed this will break code else where in the build. It is not the code which is implementing the interface which is causing the problem but the change to the interface.