I’ve put out a continuous integration environment for developers to use. Right now it has all of the Kalivo services and projects up there, but it’d be great to get your projects on there, too (more on that in a bit).

Continuous integration is a process that watches for changes to source trees, and builds/tests those trees when appropriate. It’s a good tool to keep everybody on your team aware of broken builds or other problems. It’s also a good first step to not dreading releases. You can read more about it here: http://martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html

We’re using CC.rb, a Rails version of Cruise Control. You can read more about it here: http://cruisecontrolrb.thoughtworks.com/

If you’d like to see the status of our projects (it’s made it clear that we have lots of work to do on the tests), you can see the site at ci.bsgplatform.com. While this is useful for getting the projects built initially, and for viewing specific builds and figuring out what’s broken, it’s not great for everyday use. For that, I’d suggest something like CCTray (windows, here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=71179) or CCMenu (OSX, here: http://ccmenu.sourceforge.net/)

If you’d like your project added to CC.rb, I can add it for you. I can’t make the project build successfully, though. That’s up to you. To have your project added, shoot an email to theath@ngenera.com with the following information:

Project Name
SVN repository (and credentials, if necessary)
Users to be notified of failed builds
Command to run to build your project

If special software needs to be installed (for example, MySQL), then we can add that to the CI environment. As for your build task, right now we have Ant and Rake installed on the machine. If you’re using rake, create your own rake task named ‘cruise’ and it will run automagically. If you don’t have a cruise task named, CC.rb will just do a db wipe and run the tests.

If you are using Ant, you’ll need to make sure that you have a task that builds and executes both the project and the tests.

For now, the ‘Build Now’ button on the site is functional, but after we get more of our projects running successfully on CC.rb without tweaking, that feature will be turned off to prevent abuse.