Chris Read

I’ve been at JAOO for the past few days, and while here I had a chance to do a presentation with Erik Doernenburg on Continuous Integration and CruiseControl. We used the new Beta version of Buildix 2 to show people the new CruiseControl Dashboard, and quite a few people were impressed with it. Favourite features were the CCTray integration, and the ability to see the status of a large number of projects at a glance.

As always, there were also people who were interested in hearing about how it can be used for non Java projects. I had a good chat to one person who is interested in using it on a mixed Common LISP and Erlang project he’s working on. I’m looking forward to hearing how it goes for him. Due to lack of experience on my part I could unfortunately not help him much with the darcs problems he’s having though. Some people have all the fun…

It was also quite useful to speak to people about the problems they’re currently facing when trying to use CruiseControl. A common theme is people trying to manage large numbers of builds, or trying to build products across large numbers of different platforms. These are problems the dedicated ThoughtWorks development team are currently working on, so it’s great to get the validation that we’re putting effort into the things people care about now.

Ever since I started working for ThoughtWorks, I have heard people saying things along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had some kind of Cruise-in-a-box to help us get projects up and running quickly?”. After about 6 months I was thinking the same thing, and started tinkering around with various options. Nothing really happened, until the first week of January this year when a group of us who often fill “Build Master” type rolls were all in the office together with a few days unassigned to clients. We were all sitting around a desk together catching up, when somehow the topic once again emerged. With the critical mass in place, this sparked off the birth of Buildix.

The whole point of Buildix is to help any Java based Agile Development Project get up and running as quickly as possible buy providing them with pre-configured and integrated version control system, continuous integration framework, wiki and issue tracking system. We chose our favourite products in each of these areas – Subversion, CruiseControl and Trac. Another common difficulty faced by our development teams, especially in the early stages of a project, is network access. Sometimes all we get from our clients when we arrive on site is a switch to allow us to get our laptops to talk to each other – no DNS, file shares, anything. Buildix can also help in situations like this, as it also runs Samba, and will run as a DNS and DHCP server if given the correct kernel boot parameters.

So, six months after we started, and after a few internal releases, we decided to give something back to the community that helps us do our job, and make Buildix available to everyone. Enjoy!