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Blog Archive 2005-December 2005-November 2005-October 2005-September 2005-August 2005-July 2005-June

Sun, 25 Sep 2005

The CruiseControl Quick Start Edition!

The CruiseControl team made a huge leap forward by releasing a quick start version of CC. (Okay, the team called it a "binary" version but I like Quick Start Edition better!) They bundled Jetty (a very cool Java servlet container) with their 2.3 release.

You can download the 2.3 binary release (found here), extract it, then start cruisecontrol.bat (or cruisecontrol.sh) to run CruiseControl on a sample project. The reporting engine is running as a part of CruiseControl. Just hit http://localhost:8080/cruisecontrol/ (after you're running CC of course) and you're viewing live build results less than a minute after your download. Not bad.

This should jump start anyone whose been thinking about trying out CruiseControl but didn't have time to come up to speed on the configuration and deployment.

A few suggestions to the CC team for future releases?

The Control Panel tab is present but isn't enabled. JMX is turned off. It should be on for the sample application to let people see what it can do.

The xsltlogpublisher (a publisher plugin) should have a sample XSL file that generates the same HTML as the JSP, eliminating the need for a servlet engine altogether. I started to tinker with that this evening but I don't know XSTL, I tend to create really ugly HTML, and realized that there are probably dozens of people who've already done this better than I ever could. I couldn't find anything on the web but I'll bet someone on the user's mailing list would submit a decent sample. Then the xsltlogpublisher can publish a nice HTML interface as it's default transform.

CruiseControl gets better every release! Thanks a lot guys!

Jared

posted at: 19:54 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Pop Quiz

I saw an interesting blog entry by Jimmy Nilsson this week and it made me stop and think.

The entry discusses a few current development topics and the buzz around each one, and I wondered how many people I knew would be familiar with each of the subjects. The people that I think would know are also the most effective and well-rounded developers I know.

How well read are you? Are you staying up to date on the latest developments outside of your own silo of work? (There's a blog entry in the whole silo idea... if time permits I'll write that one up in the next week.) Are you slowly becoming a Technical Idiot Savant or are you staying current in your field?

Here's Jimmy's blog entry: Language innovations aren't unimportant after all?

Before you think I'm just pointing fingers, I hadn't heard of one of the topics either! :)

Enjoy!

Jared

tw, Will and I got a nice interview printed in the October edition of Software Development Magazine. It's a page within a nice article by Mike Reilly titled The Proof Is Out There. It's a portion of the podcast interview we did with Mike a month or two ago. Last month's edition had a very favorable review of the book as well! -jrr

posted at: 00:06 | path: | permanent link to this entry