Find out which classes of a given API are used

Question

In a Java Project of mine, I would like to find out programmatically which classes from a given API are used. Is there a good way to do that? Through source code parsing or

Answer 1

I use DependencyFinder exactly for that purpose. It can analyse bytecode and extract all dependencies, then dump a report in txt or xml format (see the DependencyExtractor tool). You should be able to programatically analyse the report from your application's code.

I have integrated this in my build process in order to check that certain APIs are NOT used by an application.