Nicolas' Blog

In Agile software development, unit testing and trying to have software that “works” at all times is one of the central goals. In order to help you doing this, several systems exist in order to perform “continuous integration”. What those systems basically do is that they check your repository (SVN, CVS, bazaar, …) for changes and each time that it is required, perform a build of the system using the build system that you’ve decided (Ant, Maven, Shell Scripts, Makefile, etc….). The results of the Unit testing, and style checks performed by your build system can then be merged and transformed into a nice website so you can check on what is happening, get detailed build reports, download the latest JARs, etc…

CruiseControl has several hooks that allow you to have a mail go out when a build fails, then have another one go out when the problem is fixed. This is perfect for keeping an overall view of your software projects and knowing their “administrative health” at all times.

Continuum Continuum is the Apache software foundation’s response to CruiseControl, it basically does all that CruiseControl does, however, it requires a J2EE Application Container (Tomcat of J2ES 5) in order to be deployed. CruiseControl comes with a bundled Jitty (lightweight tomcat) which is lighter and easier to deploy if you don’t already have the infrastructure setup.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Java & Eclipse, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.