greg haygood

I've been trying to implement a continuous integration server for one of my bigger projects. Luntbuild has a lot of great features, so I've been working with that. But I keep running into stupid design flaws that always make me reconsider. For instance, Luntbuild supports a very sophisticated variable system that can be used in numerous ways. One helpful use is to refer to the previous successful build. However, I'm passing that variable through the environment for a CommandBuilder, and if there are no builds (such as after I purge them all to recover disk space), that variable is null and blows up the build! No warnings, no empty string, but an uncaptured Null exception. How silly is that!!So I surfed around, and found out DamageControl has gone into hibernation. It's ruby-based, and has all kinds of great features, but the developer apparently has no time so he's let it dangle. I don't have time to dive into it, or I might give it a go. I'd certainly do that before diving into trying to fix Luntbuild's problem....My surfing also led me to a recent article comparing some of the java-based tools. Luntbuild got some good praise out of it, and certainly looked better than CruiseControl or Continuum. CruiseControl is woefully out of date: all configuration is done by hand via a single XML file, or using a middle-quality Swing program, and the Web UI amounts to a single status page.Continuum looks nice, and is backed by the Apache folks. But it's much more restrictive than Luntbuild. Top-level projects are defined as an Ant, Maven 1/2, or shell project, but does not allow mixing of types. Luntbuild allows mixing, so I have projects that use a combination of Ant and shell scripts, which is very handy.The article also mentioned Hudson, which I hadn't seen before. Looks promising, though it's still very early in its life. Will have to keep an eye on it thought .....