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For past 4 years, I have been programming with Eclipse (for Java), and Visual Studio Express (for C#). The IDEs mentioned always seemed to provide every facility a programmer might ask for (related to programming, of course).
Lately I have been hearing about something called "build tools". I heard they're used almost in all kind of real world development. What are they exactly? What problems are they designed to solve? How come I never needed them in past four years? Are they kind of command-line stripped down IDEs?
What are build tools?
Build tools are programs that automate the creation of executable
applications from source code (e.g., .apk for an Android app). Building
incorporates compiling,linking and packaging the code into a usable or
executable form.
Basically build automation is the act of scripting or automating a
wide variety of tasks that software developers do in their day-to-day
activities like:
Downloading dependencies.
Compiling source code into binary code.
Packaging that binary code.
Running tests.
Deployment to production systems.
Why do we use build tools or build automation?
In small projects, developers will often manually invoke the build
process. This is not practical for larger projects, where it is very
hard to keep track of what needs to be built, in what sequence and
what dependencies there are in the building process. Using an
automation tool allows the build process to be more consistent.
Various build tools available(Naming only few):
For java - Ant,Maven,Gradle.
For .NET framework - NAnt
c# - MsBuild.
For further reading you can refer following links:
1.Build automation
2.List of build automation software
Thanks.
Build tools are tools to manage and organize your builds, and are very important in environments where there are many projects, especially if they are inter-connected. They serve to make sure that where various people are working on various projects, they don't break anything. And to make sure that when you make your changes, they don't break anything either.
The reason you have not heard of them before is that you have not been working in a commercial environment before. There is a whole lot of stuff that you have probably not encountered that you will within a commercial environments, especially if you work in software houses.
As others have said, you have been using them, however, you have not had to consider them, because you have probably been working in a different way to the usual commercial way of working.
Build tools are usually run on the command line, either inside an IDE or completely separate from it.
The idea is to separate the work of compiling and packaging your code from creation, debugging, etc.
A build tool can be run on the command or inside an IDE, both triggered by you. They can also be used by continuous integration tools after checking your code out of a repository and onto a clean build machine.
make was an early command tool used in *nix environments for building C/C++.
As a Java developer, the most popular build tools are Ant and Maven. Both can be run in IDEs like IntelliJ or Eclipse or NetBeans. They can also be used by continuous integration tools like Cruise Control or Hudson.
Build tools are generally to transform source code into binaries - it organize source code, set compile flags, manage dependencies... some of them also integrate with running unit test, doing static analysis, a generating documentation.
Eclipse or Visual Studio are also build systems (but more of an IDE), and for visual studio it is the underlying msbuild to parse visual studio project files under the hood.
The origin of all build systems seems like the famous 'make'.
There are build systems for different languages:
C++: make, cmake, premake
Java: ant+ivy, maven, gradle
C#: msbuild
Usually, build systems either using a propriety domain specific language (make, cmake), or xml (ant, maven, msbuild) to specify a build. The current trend is using a real scripting language to write build script, like lua for premake, and groovy for gradle, the advantage of using a scripting is it is much more flexible, and also allows you the to come up with a set of standard APIs(as build DSL).
These are different types of processes by which you can get your builds done.
1. Continuous Integration build: In this mainly developers check-in their code and right after their check-in a build initiates for building of the recent changes so we should know whether the changes done by the developer has worked or not right after the check-in is done. This is preferred for smaller projects or components of the projects. In case where multiple teams are associated with the project or there are a large no. of developers working on the same project this scenario becomes difficult to handle as if there are 'n' no. of check-in’s and the build fails at certain points it becomes highly difficult to trace whether all the breakage has occurred because of one issue or with multiple issues so if the older issues are not addressed properly than it becomes very difficult to trace down the later defects that occurred after that change. The main benefit of these builds is that we get to know whether a particular check-in is successful or not.
2. Gated check-in builds: In this type of check in a build is initiated right after the check in is done keeping the changes in a shelve sets. In this case if the build succeeds than the shelve-set check-in gets committed otherwise it will not be committed to the Team Foundation Server. This gives a slightly better picture from the continuous integration build as only the successful check-in's are allowed to get committed.
3. Nightly builds: This is also referred as Scheduled builds. In this case we schedule the builds to run for a specific time in order to build the changes. All the previous uncommitted changes from the last build are built during this build process. This is practiced when we want to check in multiple times but do not want a build every time we check in our code so we can have a fixed time or period in which we can initiate the build for building of the checked-in code.
The more details about these builds can be found at the below location.
Gated-check in Builds
Continuous Integration Builds
Nightly Builds
Build Process is a Process of compiling your source code for any errors using some build tools and creating builds(which are executable versions of the project). We(mainly developers) do some modifications in the source code and check-in that code for the build process to happen. After the build process it gives two results :
1. Either build PASSES and you get an executable version of your project(Build is ready).
2. It fails and you get certain errors and build is not created.
There are different types of build process like :
1. Nightly Build
2. gated Build
3. Continuous integration build etc.
Build tools help and automates the process of creating builds.
*So in Short Build is a Version of Software in pre-release format used by the Developer or Development team to gain confidence for the final result of their Product by continuously monitoring their Product and solving any issues early during the development process.*
You have been using them - IDE is a build tool. For the command line you can use things like make.
People use command line tools for things like a nightly build - so in the morning with a hangover the programmer has realised that the code that he has been fiddling with with the latest builds of the libraries does not work!
"...it is very hard to keep track of what needs to be built" - Build tools does not help with that all. You need to know what you want to build. (Quoted from Ritesh Gun's answer)
"I heard they're used almost in all kind of real-world development" - For some reason, software developers like to work in large companies. They seem to have more unclear work directives for every individual working there.
"How come I never needed them in past four years". Probably because you are a skilled programmer.
Pseudo, meta. I think build tools do not provide any really real benefit at all. It is just there to add a sense of security arising from bad company practices, lack of direction - bad software architectural leadership leading to bad actual knowledge of the project. You should never have to use build tools(for testing) in your project. To do random testing with a lack of knowledge of the software project does not give any sort of help at all.
You should never ever add something to a project without knowing it's purpose, and how it will work with the other components. Components can be functional separate, but not work together. (This is the responsibility of the software architect I assume).
What if 4-5 components are added into the project. You add a 6th component. Together with the first added component, it might screw up everything. No automatic would help to detect that.
There is no shortcut other than to think think think.
Then there is the auto download from repositories. Why would you ever want to do that? You need to know what you download, what you add to the project. How do you detect changes in versions of the repositories? You need to know. You can't "auto" anything.
What if we were to test bicycles and baby transports blindfolded with a stick and just randomly hit around with it. That seems to be the idea of build tool testing.
I'm sorry there are no shortcut
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis
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Anyone out there have experience with both Hudson and Bamboo? Any thoughts on the relative strengths and weaknesses of these products?
Okay, since folks keep mentioning other CI products I'll open this up further. Here are my general problem. I want to setup a CI system for a new project. This project will likely have Java components (WARs and JARs), some python modules, and possibly even a .NET component. So I want a CI server that can:
Handle multiple languages,
Deploy artifacts to servers (i.e. deploy the war if all the unit tests pass.)
I would also like something that integrated with a decent code coverage tool.
Good looking reports are nice, but not essential.
Multiple notification mechanisms when things go wrong.
I'm not worried about hosting. I'll either run it on a local server or on an Amazon instance.
Also, this maybe pie in the sky, but is there something that can also build iPhone apps?
Disclaimer: I work on Bamboo and therefore I am not going to comment on features of other CI products since my experience with them is limited.
To answer your specific requirements:
Handle multiple languages
Bamboo has out of the box support for multiple languages. Customers use it with Java, .Net, PHP, JavaScript etc. That being said, most build servers are generic enough to at least execute a script that can kick off your build process.
Deploy artifacts to servers (i.e. deploy the war if all the unit tests pass.)
Bamboo 2.7 supports Build Stages, which allow you to break up your build into a Unit Test Stage and a Deploy Stage. Only if the Unit Test Stage succeeds, the build will move on to the Deploy Stage. In Bamboo 3.0 we will support Artifact sharing between stages, allowing you to create an Artifact (e.g. your war) in the first Stage and use this Artifact in the following Stages for testing and deployment.
I would also like something that integrated with a decent code coverage tool.
Bamboo comes with support for Clover and also has a plugin available for Cobertura.
Good looking reports are nice, but not essential.
Bamboo has a whole bunch of reports which are nice, but not essential :)
Multiple notification mechanisms when things go wrong.
Bamboo can notify you via email, RSS, IM, an IDE plugin or a nice wallboard that is visible to the whole team.
I'm not worried about hosting. I'll either run it on a local server or on an Amazon instance.
From experience, it is generally cheaper to host your own CI server. But if you need to scale, Bamboo makes it easy to distribute your builds to additional local agents or scale out to Amazon via Elastic agents.
Also, this maybe pie in the sky, but is there something that can also build IPhone apps?
Similar to the answer to your first question, most CI servers will be able to build iPhone apps in some ways. It's possible that there is a little more scripting required though.
Price: Bamboo is not free(apart from our free starter license)/libre/open-source, but you will get Bamboo's source-code if you purchase a commercial license and full support. Compared to the cost of computing power and potential maintenance required for a CI server, the cost of a Bamboo license is rather small.
Hope this helps.
I have not used Bamboo but I have used Hudson, Cruise and TFS and out of all of them Hudson was hands down the best. It is ridiculously easy to set up and has a really nice web GUI for project configuration. What is great about Hudson is that it supports pretty much any language and feature you could want assuming someone has written a plug-in for it, which they probably have.
http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Plugins
We used it to run .NET, Java and C++ builds on timed intervals as well as SVN checkins with automated test harnesses and it was great. The place before last I worked at started some iPhone development just before I left and I believe they were using Hudson for that too.
Plus it's free!
Bamboo vs Hudson, at a very superficial level, seems to come down to:
Bamboo: Easy to use and good looking
Jenkins: Rough around the edges, but is far more flexible than Bamboo
Both Bamboo and Jenkins have numerous bugs (you will run into problems) but at least with Jenkins you are much more likely to have a workaround until it's fixed. With Bamboo, you're stuck waiting for an update.
Disclaimer: I'm working with Jenkins.
In our organization (quite big, more than 100 developers), we found also these two features very useful:
CAS plugin with matrix project security strategy
Build Pipeline Plugin
LTS release schedule.
About your questions:
OK
SCP PLUGIN or SSH PLUGIN
We use FINDBUGS, Static Analysis Collector Plug-in, Static Code Analysis Plug-ins, Task Scanner Plugin
Previous at point 3 + Jenkins DocLinks plugin
We use email Jenkins Email Extension Plugin, but it supports also other systems, like rss, twitter publish, sms...
We are running in a Tomcat Hosting, Locally.
Yes.
Well, I haven't used Bamboo so far, but one difference is that Hudson is free/libre/open-source software.
If you're willing to pay for it, Anthill does all of these you're looking at. We use it at my firm for our web team, and it's pretty powerful.
Handle multiple languages
Out of the box, it automates your existing scripts and manages the artifacts they produce no matter what language.
Deploy artifacts to servers (i.e. deploy the war if all the unit tests pass.)
Deployment can be added as a step in your build process. I'm not sure you'd want to deploy directly to production, but you certainly could if management says you have to.
I would also like something that integrated with a decent code coverage tool.
They integrate out of the box with Clover, Cobertura, Emma, Checkstyle, CodeSonar, Coverity, FindBugs, Fortify, Klocwork, PMD and Sonar.
Good looking reports are nice, but not essential.
I'm not sure what reports are available but there is a reports tab (I don't go in there :-) )
Multiple notification mechanisms when things go wrong.
I know it can do email (and therefore sms), integrates with a few IM services.
I'm not worried about hosting. I'll either run it on a local server or on an Amazon instance.
I saw a demo of them firing up a cloud session from an image, complete with an agent for deployment. We run it on a typical Linux box, but I know some folks run it on a VMWare server.
Also, this maybe pie in the sky, but is there something that can also build IPhone apps?
This would fall under the first one, probably.
Do you know any product like Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 that solves the parallel
development pain/conflict for Java EE development?
subversion + jira + wiki ...
I have no experience with Microsoft Team Foundation Server, but a combination of source control, continous integration (like Hudson) and a good issue tracker / collaboration tool (like Trac) gives a good overview of current activities / quality over time / current issues / progress while allowing for collaboration through wikis and the issue tracker. Mailing lists and an IRC channel can be a good additions for more permanent and live discussions respectively.
In my opinion Trac is really nice since it is easy to use, has a 'team timeline' and shows great information - code diffs along with issue numbers and developer comments bundled together - giving a great 'togetherness' feeling in the team.
The continous integration solution can provide many different code and quality metrics over time without manual intervention. Great for management.
If you don't mind to pay for good products you can look at Teamcity & Youtrack by Jetbrains. They provide useful tools for team programming.
If you work on an open source project, you can give a try to Hudson & Jira.
And Subversion or git will be a good way to manage your sources.
(Teamcity is free for an open source projects too)
Saros - Distributed Collaborative Editing and Distributed Party Programming
Pretty cool, just requires eclipse and a xmpp server.
I'm currently working in a team of 15 or so Java devs. I don't feel any pain of development. This is an environment using Maven, Subversion & Atlassian tools mainly. Maven makes it comparatively easy to build even large projects. Subversion does a decent job of updating & merging where necessary. Atlassian tools handle bug tracking, code review and automated builds but cost $$$. You could get by with Bugzilla and Hudson.
If by parallel you mean everyone gets their own branch then I suppose you could go with Clearcase but get ready to kiss your budget, sanity and productivity goodbye. Git might be a better choice for that kind of thing.
I am making my first foray into scala for a production app.
The app is currently packaged as a war file.
My plan is to create a jar file of the scala compiled artifacts and add that into the lib folder for the war file.
My enhancement is a mysql-backed app exposed via Jersey & will be integrated with a 3rd party site via HttpClient invocations. I know how to do this via plain java. But when doing it in scala, there are several decision points that I am pussyfooting on.
scala 2.7.7 or 2.8 RC ?
JDBC via querulous Is this API ready for production ?
sbt vs maven. I am comfortable with maven.
Is there a scala idiomatic wrapper for HttpClient (or should I use it just like in java) ?
I'd love to hear your comments and experiences on starting out with scala.
I would use 2.8.0. There are just too many useful features in 2.8. Besides, 2.8 is closing in on a final release. If you're just starting out, why not start out with that? FWIW, I've been using 2.8.0 since Beta1, in various tools and libraries that I use daily. While there have been bugs, they haven't been enough to make me fall back to 2.7.7. YMMV, though.
This isn't going to make your decision any easier, but there are other possibilities for database access. I've been using SQueryL, for instance; I like it. ORBroker is another option.
If you're comfortable with Maven, then use it, by all means. Personally, I prefer SBT. I get the full power of a real programming language, when I need to implement special build logic. Just as useful, I don't have to deal with XML configuration files. (XML is good for data, but it's a crappy format for a human-edited configuration file.)
You might try Databinder Dispatch. See this article for a nice overview.
If you're only going to start development, Scala 2.8 GA will probably be available by the time you go production. Even if it's not, I would choose the freshest 2.8RC pack rather than sticking to 2.7.7. 2.8 not only has a number of great features, but also contains lots of 2.7.7 bugfixes.
There're not too many production-ready ORMs designed for Scala these days. I would probably choose Lift Persistence, because of the team of professionals and friendly community behind Lift Framework. But if you don't want to risk, you should consider using old good proven Java ORMs: Hibernate, JPA, iBatis (that was recently renamed to myBatis), etc.
You should give SBT a try! It's compatible with maven POMs, so migration to SBT shouldn't be too painful for you. Benefits from using SBT:
It's designed for Scala, so you will be relieved from the burden of maintaining countless number of plugins for Maven to make it work with Scala consistently
You will be able to write build scripts in Scala (it's an amazing experience compared with XMLs)
SBT has a killer feature - continuous whatever (building, testing, deploying). SBT monitors your code, detects when its changed, and triggers an action (test, re-deployment, etc.).
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I am trying to revamp our build process, which is currently a gigantic Ant build.xml that calls into other ant build files and executes several Java classes to perform more complex logic that would be impossible/scary to attemp in Ant.
Background:
experience in Java and Ant, some Groovy
Windows platforms
Goals:
run as a combination of command line cron and when a servlet is posted to
as simplified as possible, fewest languages and bouncing between techs
I need higher level logical power that a language like Java provides and Ant is pretty easy and we use the filtering to override default properties files for different clients. Mostly I'm wondering if there is something other than Ant/Java that people use.
Except the Ant you mentioned and the scarry make/autotools, the mainstream tools are:
SCons
Jam
CMake
Maven
I use SCons, because it is python based, well-funded and elegant.
Jam seems to be the most pragmatic one.
I don't know too much about CMake.
Maven may be the choice for you as it is Java centric and more high level than Ant.
More you can find at wikipedia: List of built tools
If you pursue Maven, then you will have two problems: a complex build and learning the f#*#ing "magic" of Maven. Maven just makes the problem worse because it is obtuse and overly-complicated.
I inherited a legacy Maven 1.x build at a large Fortune 500 company. I used Maven 2.x by choice on many other projects in recent years. I evaluated Maestro, in hopes that it might make Maven tractable. My conclusion, like many other peoples' (check the 'net), is that Maven is a big step in the wrong direction. It definitely is not an improvement over Ant.
I have used Ant for MANY years, including writing a large open-source library of Ant helper scripts. I have also extensively used its .NET cousin nAnt. However, Ant has two major failings. One, XML is simply not the right place to be doing build tasks. Two, Ant and XML do not scale well to large, complex builds. In fact, I have written a lot here at SO about my experiences in that arena (and with Maven).
Industry leaders have concluded that a build is just another application, and should be approached using general application tools. However, since it involves system-level and cross-platform functionality, most development languages/platforms are not properly suited (which includes Java, and therefore Ant and Maven). That also excludes .NET.
I spent two years looking for an alternative, and I found it: Python. It has the right combination of system-level access, cross-platform portability, simplicity, readability, power, robustness, and maturity. SCons, buildbot, setuptools/easyinstall, and base Python are my current target platform for the build process. When necessary, integration with Ant, Maven, and any other such tool is easy. Meanwhile, I can use these tools for the core of any build on any platform with any source language. No more roadblocks, no more crazy complexity, no more supposedly-helpful "declarative" scripting, no more black-box f#*#ing "magic".
If you can't switch to Python, then try Ant + Ivy (at apache.org). It gives you Maven's cool repository without most of Maven's evils. That is what I am doing as well, where necessary and suitable.
Best wishes.
Also take a look at
Gant
Gradle
While more general purpose build systems like SCons are very powerful, the Java support is somewhat limited in comparison to systems specially tailored to build Java projects.
I like using Rake as you can fall back on the power of the whole Ruby language and it's framework library when needed.
I use Ant, taking advantage of its macro feature. If you layout your project in a consistent mannner, you can eliminate a lot of the duplication by writing macros.
I've been building up an Antlib containing macros and custom tasks that I reuse across multiple projects.
Alternatively, some people swear by Maven. Other people just swear about Maven.
I use Maven, not just for build, I also use their release/dist plugin.
In a pair of commands I can have code that was in a source control to build, package and release.
The release plugin handles updating the version numbers, dist handles how to put everything together and zip it.
Ant looks hard when compared to Maven. Sure there is a learning curve with Maven, but reading a pom.xml is far easier than reading a build.xml.
Maven needs to be far less verbose.
I like Ant but only if you spend the time to write your own Java plugins to encapsulate complex actions. It isn't hard but unfortunately most people try to write their logic in XML w/the ant-contrib stuff. I think this is a huge mistake.
I've heard good things about rake and the groovy tools (mentioned in another comment) but I've got no experience with them.
If you're trying to script together several steps in a life-cycle you might be better off using a process automation based build server like AnthillPro (Cruise, BuildForge and Electric-Commander are the others in this space).
Another place to ask this kind of question is the CITCON mailing list. CITCON is a conference on Continuous Integration and Testing and the associated mailing list has turned into a really great community around these kinds of topics.
(I'm an organizer for CITCON but a labor of love not a profit maker. It really does have a really helpful mailing list. If I was pimping something for money it would be The CI Guys. ;-) )
Stick with Ant since you're building Java. I've mixed Ant/SCons for some JNI work, but in general I'd stay with Ant especially since you've got an existing build setup in Ant. Porting to Maven will be like shoving a square peg through a wall with no holes.
Embrace your custom Java logic for any and consider writing proper Ant tasks instead of executing external Java code. I solved some very complex parts of our build process by simply extending Ant to do exactly what I needed, ex. managing icon resources for a large gui project or injected subversion information directly info jar manifests (thank you SVNKit)
I'd go with Ant any day of the week.
It's not perfect; XML is very verbose and implementing any logic at all is almost impossible, but even the most junior engineer on the team can at least understand what the ant file is doing within a day.
Complex logic can be refactored using java and integrated in ant, if you so wish. Ant gives you all the power of java:)
Dependency resolution is difficult no matter what system you use. With ant, the best solutions seem to be either a lib directory in which all your jars are stored, or an internal web server from which the libraries are copied at build time.
I also have some experience with both Maven 1 and Maven 2. That experience left me with the feeling that Maven is awesome for hobby projects, but can have complications for software you need to maintain over time.
I see two important problems with Maven:
Any dependency you import using Maven may change over time without you knowing it, resulting in weird problems.
You import the licenses of not only the software you import directly using Maven, but also the licenses used by the libraries which are indirectly imported
In short, I dislike the fact that the build depends on the time it is started. That can be a true problem when producing a bugfix release a year after the production release.
These problems can of course be managed (maybe using a nexus proxy) but you need to consider them before rebuilding the build system. At my company we decided to use Ant for all new project and try to port maven 1 and 2 to ant whenever the occasion presents itself. It's just too difficult to keep it working.
My advice, if you and your team know how to deal with ant, try to refactor your ant file and don't jump on some other build tool. It just takes too much time to get it right; time you could spend making money and surviving as a company :)
I use Rake everywhere I can. Where you need to build java code you might use it with jruby, or look at something like: buildr
We use luntbuild. It's a web app that's very easy to use. It will check out from CVS/SVN, automatically increment the version/build number, execute build tasks in ant scripts and tag your repository with the new version. Can schedule automatic builds, have it email you or contact you via IM, also has security and build dependencies.
We're still using version 1.2.3 but I see it's up to 1.6.0. It just works.
http://luntbuild.javaforge.com/
EDIT: Re-reading your question I see now that you're looking for something to replace Ant. In our case Ant is not really a problem. We have projects setup in Netbeans, which uses Ant for building and we just have to implement some hooks into the existing scripts provided by Netbeans which is very easy to do.
EDIT: Looks like you can call Ant from Groovy. That would be nice because then you can re-use all the tasks that already exist for Ant.
http://groovy.codehaus.org/Using+Ant+from+Groovy
Try FinalBuilder
It provides a GUI interface to whatever your build process may be and has a native action for almost everything, plus an action studio where you can create your own.
With a bit of planning can be very streamlined.
I have to add to these one solution that I find I can't live without ... its called Hudson. It only takes a few seconds to setup and you can usually get away with most of whatever your existing ANT files are already doing.
Additionally, Hudson provides a great way to "cron" builds, execute test cases, and generate "artifacts" (e.g. build products) in a way that anyone can download.
It is hard to capture all that it can do for you ... so just try it out ... you will no be disappointed.
Maven is really good choice to do large builds...in the majority of the cases where it doesn't work is very simple. The people misunderstand the concepts of Maven. If your are working with the "maven way" you will end up with smaller modules which gives you a better architecture in your software. On the other hand things like Hudson will support you in reducing build times by using Maven, cause Hudson supports to build only changed modules which is not supported by any other build tool. The problem with Maven is to learn and understand the concepts of Maven for example the structure of a project(folders etc.) or only a single artifact etc. The build-cycle will support you in different areas: compiling, packaging, deployment and release which is not supported by other tools (only if you implement it by hand...I've wrote many large Ant scripts to reach this)...Other problem like changes over the time are caused by ignoring the best practice and pin pointing versions which are used.
I use mainly Ant, but Maven is also a good tool. With ant you can do anything you want.
At our company, we created a general purpose ant builder that does a lot of things: Build, Compess images, minify, generate documentation, pack files.. It is open source and we are open to improvements. You can get it here:
https://github.com/edertone/TurboBuilder