From the category archives:

Build

Build Pattern: Facade

March 2, 2010
facade

Let’s face it: Build scripts can age as badly as Steven Seagal. What do you do when yours is needing more than botox and a mud pack?
What you shouldn’t do is attempt to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. There’s no guaruntee that it’ll look any better by the time you’ve done that, [...]

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Ant 1.8.0 released

February 10, 2010

The Apache Ant team just announced Ant 1.8.0.  The most stunning change is that of lexically scoped local properties.  Now, you can keep a property scoped to a target, or a sequential block.  Hopefully this will mean poeple rely less on ant-contrib.   Many people appear to misunderstand the Ant properties mechanism; maybe they are [...]

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Continuous Delivery: new book now online

February 8, 2010
less continuous delivery

There’s a new book in Martin Fowler’s Signature Series: “Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation” [you heard that here first]. It couldn’t be written by a nicer couple of guys: Jez Humble and David Farley. Both authors have been scribing away on this book for years.
The book [...]

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Build Refactoring

January 17, 2010

Build Refactoring: Refactoring is a nice term for making something a bit less crap without changing it’s behaviour. You can slowly refactor a build in the same way you can refactor code. I’ve seen several projects where developers have opted to bin the build and start from scratch. That doesn’t guarantee a [...]

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SparkBuild – build optimisation

January 14, 2010
sparkler

This is a guest post from Scott Castle of Electric Cloud. I’ve been wanting to get these guys on the blog for a while.
Scott has 5 USB drives full of Electric Cloud software, videos, docs and more to give away. All you need to do is tweet the #sparkbuild hashtag, and 5 lucky [...]

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Story: Fan or Die

July 11, 2009

David Goh contributed this beauty:
Back in 1994 or so at my first job, we were building some train control system software. We had a series of mainframes that we were using to test the software on, which all lived in a small room with no extra airconditioning. The only point of transmission between the [...]

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What is a Maven POM?

July 8, 2009

Why I am asking about Maven POMs? I do know, honest. But I often read blog posts or articles about Maven and wonder about the language being used. There’s some very domain specific terms in use here. So I decided to offer some definitions for people starting out with Maven.

Today, we start with POMs. I [...]

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Build Pattern: The Captive Build Tool

June 23, 2009

Check your build tool into your version control system. Ideally you’d do this in a relative location to your project(s). That way you can have a go.bat or go.sh: a one line wrapper script to call the correct build tool from your project. Don’t get clever. This should be the simplest script you [...]

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Build Refactoring: Extract Target

December 9, 2008

Your build files probably need some TLC. Sorry. It’s true. If you’re lucky enough to work on a project with clean code (and let’s face it, most codebases aren’t too pretty), then you’re even luckier to have a nice clean build. Wait! Don’t go getting upset, I can help you.

I’ll [...]

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CI Cage Fight – Cruise

November 25, 2008

Note: I’m not going to even pretend to be unbiased about this one. I used to work for these people. I was involved in hiring Chris, and I was involved in some early discussions about previous incarnations of this product.
Chris Read presented Cruise, from ThoughtWorks Studios. Loads of people think that this product [...]

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