Here’s Tuesday’s links from My Twitter Stream.

• 20:36: Kohsuke Kawaguchi » Announcing Beta Availability of InfraDNA’s Certified Hudson CI (ICHCI) Server http://kohsuke.org/2010/07/19/announcing-beta-availability-of-infradnas-certified-hudson-ci-ichci-server/

Links for 2010-07-20 is a post from: The Build Doctor. Sponsored by AnthillPro, the build and deployment automation server that lets you release with confidence.

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Here’s Monday’s links from My Twitter Stream.

• 21:36: JetBrains TeamCity Blog » Blog Archive » Control your builds queue with Build Priorities http://blogs.jetbrains.com/teamcity/2010/07/19/control-your-builds-queue-with-build-priorities/
• 16:45: Hudson Maven repository | Goldin, the Junior http://evgeny-goldin.com/blog/2010/07/17/hudson-maven-repository/

Links for 2010-07-19 is a post from: The Build Doctor. Sponsored by AnthillPro, the build and deployment automation server that lets you release with confidence.

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Here’s Wednesday’s links from My Twitter Stream.

• 19:44: Bootstrapping Puppet on EC2 with MCollective | R.I.Pienaar http://www.devco.net/archives/2010/07/14/bootstrapping_puppet_on_ec2_with_mcollective.php

Links for 2010-07-14 is a post from: The Build Doctor. Sponsored by AnthillPro, the build and deployment automation server that lets you release with confidence.

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Here’s Monday’s links from My Twitter Stream.

• 20:59: Extreme feedback device – The Batman Lamp – jensjaeger.com http://www.jensjaeger.com/2010/04/extreme-feedback-device-the-batman-lamp/

Links for 2010-07-12 is a post from: The Build Doctor. Sponsored by AnthillPro, the build and deployment automation server that lets you release with confidence.

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What have you done? I wrote a Build Radiator, or eXtreme Feedback Device.

Not another one! Why?

A few weeks ago, someone quite innocently locked their Continuous Integration server.  They locked it so hard, it caused the threads that listen for incoming TCP connections to lock up.  This quietly removed their Build Radiator and Continuous Integration server UI from the network.   Such an event causes great hilarity, as it causes developers to think that there’s a network issue, and ask the wrong people to help fix the Continuous Integration server.

What caused the problem was a slightly mangled version of a plugin that creates a Build Radiator.  The product in question is fine.  The outage did cause me to reflect on scaling Continuous Integration, however.  As we scale up development teams, when should we stop dicking about with the server?  How do you expose the state of the build if you keep your mitts off it?

So I set out to build an eXtreme Feedback Device that had no dependencies, and no need to deploy.  The first version is below. It supports Hudson right now, and I plan to add support for more Continuous Integration servers in the future..

http://xfd.build-doctor.com

How does it work? When you load the page, it tries to connect via the JSONP protocol to a Hudson server.  Unlike technologies like XmlHttpRequest, JSONP can connect to a server that isn’t the origin of the current page, as it returns a callback function which the JavaScript client can sanitise before running.  The results are then built up from the array of JSON build results.  Hudson is one of the few Continuous Integration servers with a JSONP interface.  I’ll support any Continuous Integration server that supports JSONP or any AJAX technique that doesn’t run into Same Origin Policy issues.  I’m already working on support for the next server.

Who wrote it? I started it.  It was fun learning JavaScript, CSS and JQuery during this project. That’s not the whole story, however. Without the tireless efforts of Kushal and the sage advice of Ahmed, it would still be very basic.

What’s next? I’m going to add JSONP support to a Continuous Integration server.  We’d also like your feedback.  I’d like to add some more information to it: for example, it would be nice to be able to tell you there’s a new version of this tool, or perhaps your CI server.

Are there others? Yes.

Announcing XFD is a post from: The Build Doctor. Sponsored by AnthillPro, the build and deployment automation server that lets you release with confidence.

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Here’s Wednesday’s links from My Twitter Stream.

• 06:24: Visualizing Build Processes « The Electric Cloud Blog http://blog.electric-cloud.com/2010/06/29/visualizing-build-processes/#

Links for 2010-06-30 is a post from: The Build Doctor. Sponsored by AnthillPro, the build and deployment automation server that lets you release with confidence.

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CruiseControl was a fantastic brand for ThoughtWorks. You can understand why they decided to base the name for their new, commercially licensed Continuous Integration server on the old. That didn’t work out so well. The response to the confusion about the products has been interesting however: ThoughtWorks have renamed and reskinned the product.

Out: Cruise.
In: Go.

I reached out to some of the ThoughtWorks Studios people for comment. Here’s Chad Wathington:

We built Cruise with the idea of first class support for build and deployment pipelines. We’ve renamed Cruise to Go because we really want to take that idea to the next level, to emphasize continuous deployment, to emphasize “going live” with software, not just continuous integration. Beyond the name change, we’ve added support for environment management and we’ve revamped the user experience to fit our deployment pipeline metaphor more strongly. We think people are going to like it.

It’s interesting that the company that is so strongly associated with developers is focussing on deployment. Encouraging, too.

Here’s Jez Humble:

Cruise 2.0 is our biggest and most exciting release to date. Not only have we added more functionality than any other release, we’ve also completely re-implemented the UI (in JRuby on Rails) to make it much easier to manage your build and testing infrastructure for large organizations. The big features in Cruise 2.0 are:

• First-class support for environments, so you can deploy any version of any application to any environment and manage multiple services that share the same environment (e.g. integration testing with a SOA). You can also use this functionality to partition your build grid.
• Templates so you can define reusable workflows for pipelines – useful if you have multiple projects that use the same workflow, or for managing branches.
• The most powerful test analysis on the market. Split your tests into suites and run them on the build grid, and Cruise will not only automatically tell you which tests failed, but (if some tests have been failing for a while) also which check-in broke each test, and who was responsible. There’s no need for specialized test runners – just tell Cruise where to find the reports.
• The ability to trigger a CI build with any revision from version control. If a pipeline has multiple VCSs, you can even mix and match versions from them – another facility that no other tool offers.

Cruise now also kills the process tree on agents when you cancel a stage, lets you run pipelines on a timer (Cron syntax), and lets you specify environment variables when you trigger a pipeline.

Sounds like an improvement. This product has come a long way since they were working on the first incarnation of their commercial CI server.  They had to pack a lot of features into 2008’s release of Cruise, because the game changed around 2006.  As Jez comments, there are now some unique features in their product. I’ve got a backlog of reviews to do as long as my arm, but I’ll try and get something done.

Update: Corrected an ambiguity in the last paragraph.  It sounded pretty harsh.

(image via CJ Sorg)

Going on a Cruise: ThoughtWorks Studios rebrands their CI server is a post from: The Build Doctor. Sponsored by AnthillPro, the build and deployment automation server that lets you release with confidence.

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It’s funny; you can almost correlate my going freelance announcement with the fall in posts on this blog. I can’t complain though; I’m fully booked, on work that I’m good at, with clients who are doing things that seem to matter.

To stop the blog atrophying totally, I’m getting some help. The (soon-to-be) Mrs Build Doctor is helping run the admin side of the business, making sure we’re legally compliant and getting the bills paid. Her help is invaluable.

We’re also very lucky to have Kushal Pisavadia join us for the summer. Kushal is starting a degree in UX and Maths this September. He’ll be helping out with a few of my many unfinished side projects, as well as assisting with my onsite work. Kushal has already made a significant contribution to a project (more on that soon), for which I am very grateful.

EJ Ciramella has also been invaluable with his series of Maven posts, writing relevant and thoughtful posts at precisely the time that I wasn’t able to. Thank you, EJ! I just hope I manage to share some thoughts from the day job, now that the day job is almost entirely relevant to the blog.

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Silos are for Farmers, my QCon London talk is online.

The conference season this year managed to dovetail nicely with the birth of The Build Doctor Limited. This was nice in that I was doing a conference talk at the same time that I started my own company; evil in that I didn’t rehearse as much as I might have. It turned out okay despite my nerves at the start. It was a gamble asking the audience to participate, but that seemed to pay off: there was a kind of dialogue, which I find more engaging.

Thanks to everyone for speaking up – especially my heckler (you didn’t come to the pub!), Kirk and Sam. Thanks to Chris for organising a great new conference track.

Silos are for Farmers

Silos are for Farmers: now online is a post from: The Build Doctor. Sponsored by AnthillPro, the build and deployment automation server that lets you release with confidence.

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Here’s Tuesday’s links from My Twitter Stream.

• 21:27: Sailing down the Hudson with RVM – GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/712609699/sailing-down-the-hudson-with-rvm
• 21:27: CloudShark Brings Wireshark to the Web – Packet Life http://packetlife.net/blog/2010/jun/22/cloudshark-brings-wireshark-web/
• 21:26: Evan Bottcher » Blog Archive » DevOps Mind Map http://evan.bottch.com/2010/06/23/devops-mind-map/
• 21:25: IllegalStateException: Fun with Javascript for Hudson http://illegalstateexception.blogspot.com/2010/05/fun-with-javascript-for-hudson.html
• 21:24: Better Deployments Through Pairing – AnthillPro Blog http://www.anthillpro.com/blogs/anthillpro-blog/2010/06/22/better_deployments_through_pairing.html

Links for 2010-06-22 is a post from: The Build Doctor. Sponsored by AnthillPro, the build and deployment automation server that lets you release with confidence.

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