Journal Article - Driving On CruiseControl - Part 1

[Dirk Schreckmann]

The just-released September 2004 edition of The JavaRanch Journal includes an article by Lasse Koskela, "Driving On CruiseControl - Part 1".

Please use this thread to comment on and discuss the article.

[David Hibbs]

Heh. I'll copy some comments of mine from another thread since this is really a better place for the discussion.

I thought the article was a pretty good description. I learned of CC via an article in the WSDJ which was very similar.

My problem with CC is that, as was noted in the intro, "AntHill is not as common as CruiseControl, but it is often quoted as being significantly easier to set up and use than CruiseControl."

Amen! I had some real headaches trying to understand the CC setup. When comparing the initial setup with that of AntHill, you can either directly create or edit the CC XML file directly or you can use the Anthill GUI.

There were several other weaknesses of CC besides the XML setup I didn't like, too. Some of these may have been fixed -- I quit following CC closely due to time constraints and the fact that I had found a system that worked and was easy to use. =)

Anyway, the other problems I had with CC were as follow:
a) Had to do a manual check-out to start the process
b) Had to run multiple copies of CC for multiple projects.
c) Had to manually start CC rather than having it start as a service (i.e. type 'cruisecontrol' at a command prompt)
d) Project dependencies didn't exist/work, because of (b).
e) Had to explicitly 'bootstrap' the build.xml file in case of updates

The logs and web site are very nice, though, I must admit!

Frankly, I considered building a web admin interface for the setup. But then I found b-e and AntHill.

For a group of developers that were/(are?) averse to doing extra work to set up a continuous integration loop, AntHill was the hands-down winner in my book.

Maybe I'll come back to CC later. Or maybe I'll jump over to Maven. For now, though, you can add me to the list of people quoted as saying AntHill is "significantly easier to set up and use than CruiseControl."