Archive
Vote for XFD in the Ultimate Wallboard Challenge
Julian Simpson, aka The Build Doctor, has been working away at a nice web based Build Status Monitor called XFD for a while now. One of my complaints for years has been that there’s no nice build status tool that’s easy to use, but I think he’s on to something.
It’s entered in the Ultimate Wallboard Challenge, and you can vote for it here.
The End of Buildix
I’ve been putting off this post for a few months now, but I think the time has finally come to admit what I’m sure people who care have guessed for a while – active development on Buildix has stopped, and will probably not resume. The site will stay up for the foreseeable future, nothing will vanish, but nothing new will be added either.
We started the project because at the time, setting up a new Continuous Integration server was quite an arduous task. The only real option out there for a Java project was CruiseControl, and it could take a new developer days to get their first build through the system. Thankfully though this is no longer the case.
Since then the whole CI landscape has changed. Just having a single “build server” is now more the exception than the rule. It’s all about build farms these days using tools like Cruise, Hudson and TeamCity. They integrate nicely with a variety of SCM’s and story tracking tools. Setting up a build environment with these tools is really easy now. I’d like to think that Buildix at least had something to do with helping people to see how easy it could be to get a CI environment up and running, and I know that at least in the case of Cruise this is true because I’ve been part of that team.
So – thank you to all of you who used Buildix and liked it and provided feedback. Thank you also to the current big players in the CI field who put effort into making sure that looking after your CI environment no longer needs to be a full time job for someone.
Self Identifying Software
How often has someone come up to you and asked you what build of your software is currently deployed in a specific environment?
How many times have you come across a .jar or .dll file and wondered what version it is? Especially when using Open Source Software?
The most frightening one for me is when I’ve looked at a cluster of production servers and noticed that the .war file for the application deployed on it is a different size on one of the nodes. Which one was the correct one to deploy? Luckily this happened to me a long time ago, but I know that people out there are still having this problem today.
The solution is what I call “Self Identifying Software”. Every build of your software needs to have something that tells you what version it is and how to get back to the source code that created it. Having a build label or release number visible in your application is a good start, but it does not make your software Self Identifying. Product companies have been doing this for ever. The problem is that for that number to be useful (particularly when you’re trying to access the source code to reproduce and fix a bug) you then need to refer to a build system or release notes to find out where the source code came from (if you’re lucky). It often also does not apply to development builds. To be truly Self Identifying you need to make sure that every build (including builds developers create on their workstations) also includes enough information from the SCM system so that anyone who has access to the source code can go right back to the exact source code that produced that binary. For example, if you use Subversion as your SCM then this will be a URL and a revision number.
This is not exactly a new concept, it’s something I (and others) have been doing for a number of years now. The reason I’ve decided to write about it now though is that recently I was showing a new guy around one of the projects I’m working on at the moment, and when I showed him how to determine which version of the app was deployed he was delighted.
Read more…
Podcast on Continuous Integration available
Last year at JAOO I had the chance to speak to Markus from Software Engineering Radio about the talk I gave there on Continuous Integration. It’s finally available now over here. The slides that go along with the talk are available from the JAOO site.
This work by Chris Read is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Chris Read 