Tool writing: a forgotten art? (software tools)

The author decided to create a tool to fit the needs. In the process, the author discovered something important: writing stand-alone tools that you can combine efficiently with others to handle more demanding tasks appears to be becoming a forgotten art. The author created a metric tool, named ckjm, using the design principles the author outlined earlier. The tool operates on a list of compiled Java classes specified as arguments or read from its standard input. It then prints to its standard output a single line for each class, containing the class name and the six metrics values. Ant Java-based build tool and adding an XML output option.