Another morning comes and goes when somebody makes a late-night check-in to meet a deadline, and nobody notices that the build is broken until half the team checks out the broken build. Any seasoned developer has dealt with these types of issues in a variety of forms and any seasoned developer has broken the build as well. How do you protect yourself and the team from forgetting to check in files, from producing code that only compiles on your development machine, or from instigating other frustrating and time-wasting behavior?
One tool in your arsenal is a continual build system. Continual build systems may go as far as to compile and run the unit tests every time you check in modifications. Regardless of how often you build, you always want at least a nightly build system. The benefits of such systems are well understood in the industry now—I know of no software development methodology that does not advocate a nightly build.
As with other tools, it is no magic bullet, but it is part of the toolkit necessary to produce quality software. At some point, you will ask management how builds and releases are handled. You may be surprised to discover that the builds are handled by hand on a release-by-release basis, which is common. There may even be a person or entire department devoted to producing software builds. You can imagine and probably have experienced the problems that such systems can produce.
So why don't you have a nightly build? Invariably, everyone agrees that a nightly build system would be nice. But no time has been budgeted for such a snazzy tool—tools are a notorious waste of time for engineers. Weeks can be whittled away playing with the tool and slipping on the feature set.
Management will not budget time for a build tool that requires weeks to create. In this article, I show you how to put together a basic build system in a couple of days. It is just a matter of making some installs and plugging in your Ant scripts. We use the open source Web application Anthill; you will find its configuration to be only a small part of setting up such a system.
So let's get to it. To start, I presume the following about your situation and your abilities: You are a reasonably savvy Java developer. You have worked on at least a couple of Java projects, and you not only know the language, but you also know a bit about Web applications and servlet containers. I am also going to presume that you know a bit about Ant and how to use Ant scripts. Finally, I'm going to presume that you have some understanding of source code control and have already put your code into such a system.
What is my justification for such presumptions? First, brevity: my goal is explain how to quickly create a nightly build system, not how to use CVS Concurrent Versions System. Second, practicality: while it is true that most shops have no functional build systems, it has always been true, in my experience, that shops have source code control. Third, my estimation of the time it will take you to set up the system is predicated on the expectation that such items like a Tomcat server don't intimidate you.
If you already know about Web applications, then running one is no big deal. But if you have no idea about such things and something goes wrong, trouble-shooting how to run the Web application will dramatically increase your time.
My assertion is that a professional Java developer can set up a nightly build system in two days or less. I say two days, because I recommend you spend some time reading the manuals for each system component. Reading manuals and downloading software simply takes time, so while you might do this in an afternoon, you should probably allocate a couple of days.
We will create the example system on a Windows XP machine because it is common and, most likely, the kind of machine that you have easily available for use. The OS is really rather irrelevant. All the tools used are cross-platform or have a Unix equivalent. You do have to know how to do one thing: if I ask you to set an environment variable in the Windows environment, you will need to know how to set the environment variable in your flavor of Unix.
Furthermore new nodes or functionality may change substantially or disappear entirely from one build to the next. These nightlies are a great way to get a sneak peek at what may be coming in the next version of KNIME and provide feedback and suggestions.
They are not a particularly safe way to do real work. Really, really, really important disclaimer This is most definitely not production quality code.
If you use a continuous integration server, it will generally be configured to build the code and run the unit tests on every check in. At the end of each day you may want to run more extensive tests, regression test and integration tests for example, which take too long to run on each check in and these would be triggered after the nightly build.
If you have a full continuously delivery pipeline the nightly build may also be used to deploy the built code to environments for user testing. The term is frequently used for large projects where a complete rebuild of the finished product from source takes too long for the individual developer to do this as a part of their normal development cycle.
Instead a complete rebuild is done automatically during the night so the build computer have hours to do the build and have it ready for the developers coming in the next morning, so they can continue working on their individual tiny bit on top of the new version.
These days, it is frequent that the project includes a lot of tests ensuring the correct operation of the code, as well as generate and publish documentation from the source like javadoc.
Nightly builds are good thing, they provide immediate feed back to developers if they broke the build. Having a nightly build means that the software is stable and likely to build for new users.
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