Chris Read

Early last year I did a Quick Comparison of some of the popular CI servers of the time. Things have moved on since then, and I’ve actually been involved with the Cruise development team since then. Now that Cruise has been released, a number of people both inside and outside ThoughtWorks have asked me to put together a follow up article – here it is.

The list of available products out there has grown a lot in the past 18 months, and the features that they support are really great. Since I did the last review I’ve actively avoided having a look at the other tools out there to keep a clear focus on what I wanted to see in Cruise. Doing this review has been a great way for me to see what everyone else has been up to.

Just having loads of features does not automatically make for a good tool though. Instead of having a shooting match between who does what, I’ve taken a little sample Java servlet that I use for demos and tried to get it working with all the tools. This project is hosted on a local subversion repository. I’m going to try set it up to simply run unit tests and create my distributable .war file. Areas that I’m going to look at are:

• Installation (on Linux, OSX and Windows)
• Setting up my existing project
• What did the tool inspire me to try next

Tools that I’ll be trying out are (in alphabetical order):

• AntHillPro 3.5.3
• Bamboo 2.1.1
• Cruise 1.0
• CruiseControl 2.7.3
• Hudson 1.252
• Pulse 1.2.56
• TeamCity 3.1.2

Read More »

I had one of those rare opportunities today when I got to pair with one of the developers on our project. The story he’s working on has to do with generating usage documentation for a webservice at runtime. What he wanted was a list of source files to be available at runtime. The solution he came up with (which does work) was the following Java program:

package com.example.service.utils;

import java.io.BufferedWriter;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileWriter;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Arrays;

public class ListControllers {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        String outputFile = args[0];
        String srcDir = args[1];
        File f = new File(srcDir);
        File serverDir = new File(f, "com/example/service/server");
        String[] entries = serverDir.list();
        Arrays.sort(entries);
        BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(outputFile, false));
        for(String entry : entries) {
            if(entry.endsWith("Controller.java")) {
                writer.write(name + "\n");
            }
        }
        writer.flush();
        writer.close();
    }
}

This was then called by the following Ant snippet:

<mkdir dir="${target.dir}/war/WEB-INF/classes"/>
<java classname="com.example.service.utils.ListControllers"
      classpath="${main.jar}" failonerror="true">
    <arg value="${target.dir}/war/WEB-INF/classes/controller.list"/>
    <arg value="${src.dir}"/>
</java>

This was then bundled up in the war file so that he could get his mits on it at runtime. It works, but is not without problems. My primary complaint is that it makes the build harder to understand. To figure out what’s going you need to find and open up the .java file, and be able to understand Java in the first place.

After a few minutes of pairing we managed to fix it with the following Ant snippet:

<mkdir dir="${target.dir}/war/WEB-INF/classes"/>
<pathconvert property="controller.list.propery"
             pathsep="${line.separator}">
    <sort>
        <path>
            <fileset dir="${src.dir}/com/example/service/server"
                     includes="*Controller.java"/>
        </path>
    </sort>
    <map from="${src.dir}/com/example/service/server/" to=""/>
</pathconvert>
<echo message="${controller.list.propery}"
    file="${target.dir}/war/WEB-INF/classes/controller.list"/>

Not only is it now easy to see what we’re trying to do in the build file, but we managed to replace 29 lines of Java + Ant with 10 lines of Ant. Sweet!