Archive for May, 2006

Sun jars start entering maven repositories

Thursday, May 4th, 2006

Great news for maven users. Finally! Jars (licensed under the CDDL) start entering the maven repositories. No more manual upload to your local/company repository. According to Koshuke, more may be announced before JavaOne.

Posted in Java, dev. infrastructure | No Comments »

Martin’s Fowler updated his Continuous Integration paper

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006

Martin Fowler just updated his paper on continuous integration. Interesting read as always. I liked the way his style evolved over the years. I find the document even better at introducing CI to newcomers: it tells a nice little story.
Some things to remember:

  • avoid branching when not necessary
  • distinction between Self-Testing code and TDD
  • CI is more than the tool
  • introduction to the notion of staged builds (that should answer recurring questions on how to speed my build up?)
  • a little note on automated deployment. You might also want to look into SwitchTower
  • test in a clone environment
  • a focus on decreased risk as the main benefit of doing CI
  • some pointers to end to end testing tools (one of which I didn’t know)

The document doesn’t address problem related to dependencies but I feel that this issue is still new and will become a bigger problem as more and more FOSS libraries get used by corporations.

If you’re in search of a CI tools, I will of course recommend you the CruiseControl[.Net], but you may also want to look at alternatives, some of them also sponsored directly or indirectly by thoughtworks. Check the CI Server Matrix.
As for those still wondering how to use Lava Lamps :)

Posted in continuous integration | No Comments »