Continuous Integration Cage Fight: Buildforge
Posted on by Julian SimpsonThis is the final (and very late) installment in the CI cage fight series. The last speaker was Leuwie from IBM, discussing IBM Rational Build Forge.
By this stage in the talk I was done with trying to take notes (curse you, cute eeepc that caught Tom’s eye!) and film at the same time. Things got a little sketchy. Here’s what I managed to note down:
The licensing model is by concurrent user. As it truly is an enterprise product, you can’t just go quoting fixed prices ( as different clients have all sorts of deals for buying their gear). We were a tough audience in that respect, as most of us come from a small product/small team background.
BuildForge understands environments. My notes said ‘environments are mapped’: that was probably something profound six months ago (on the bright side, it’s less than six months to the next CITCON!).
Build agents have manifests that describe their capabilities. Pretty standard. It will parse build output and fail on if a given string is detected. It also supports LDAP. Good.
BuildForge runs commands as lowest common denominator for integration. That includes VCS access.
It has wide platform support. I think Leuwie mentioned something about Nintendo support as well – which means NetBSD support. Officially, it supports:
Windows, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, Mac OS X, z/OS, i5/OS
This is possibly the best agent support that I’ve ever seen in a CI server and that’s what I’d say a uniqe feature is. If you’re already drinking the IBM Kool-aid, then it’s probably a very good fit for you. Which brings me to my main point; I’m probably not the guy to be commenting on this stuff.
I might have worked with WebSphere, DB2 and AIX. I’ve even installed OS/2. Still don’t really understand the culture – even though I apprecate what IBM’s research has brought to our industry. So all I can do is say thanks to Leuwie for fighting in the cage, and a huge thanks to IBM Nederland for hosting a great weekend in Amsterdam.
