Today I delved into the world of automation, in an attempt to try and refine and automate some of the process that happens around here. I have known about the existance of CruiseControl for well over a year now, but I haven’t had (or necessarily needed) the chance to use it. With the size of my development group growing larger on quite a regular basis, tools like this are going to become increasingly necessary.

What is Cruise Control?

Taken straight from their home page..

CruiseControl is a framework for a continuous build process. It includes, but is not limited to, plugins for email notification, Ant, and various source control tools. A web interface is provided to view the details of the current and previous builds.

This means we’ll be able to focus on bigger and better things, such as writing unit tests to improve the quality control of our code, automating deployments when it is time for our releases. (including database scripts that need to run, as well as the code)

Goals for this side project of mine include:

• Improving the way we version our database changes
• Bringing in regular use of unit testing into my group
• Bringing in regular use of functional and performance testing

From what I understand, CruiseControl, along with other tools such as ANT and Selenium will allow us to achieve these objectives. What will be interesting is that I haven’t read anywhere on achievements with this specific to ColdFusion.

Today I delved into the world of automation, in an attempt to try and refine and automate some of the process that happens around here. I have known about the existance of CruiseControl for well over a year now, but I haven’t had (or necessarily needed) the chance to use it. With the size of my development group growing larger on quite a regular basis, tools like this are going to become increasingly necessary.

What is Cruise Control?

Taken straight from their home page..

CruiseControl is a framework for a continuous build process. It includes, but is not limited to, plugins for email notification, Ant, and various source control tools. A web interface is provided to view the details of the current and previous builds.

This means we’ll be able to focus on bigger and better things, such as writing unit tests to improve the quality control of our code, automating deployments when it is time for our releases. (including database scripts that need to run, as well as the code)

Goals for this side project of mine include:

• Improving the way we version our database changes
• Bringing in regular use of unit testing into my group
• Bringing in regular use of functional and performance testing

From what I understand, CruiseControl, along with other tools such as ANT and Selenium will allow us to achieve these objectives. What will be interesting is that I haven’t read anywhere on achievements with this specific to ColdFusion.

This will be the first post in a series of many on this topic.

I decided the whole blogspot thing wasn’t working out… It just didn’t do everything that I wanted it to, so I’ve moved to the more open and extensible wordpress blog. I’d really like to hear your thoughts on the new look. There are also many plugins that I have available to me now that I didn’t before. I’ll be playing with those over the next few days. I also switched the name servers of mutantweb to point to this site. I’ve also launched it under www.kensykora.net - we’ll see how long that takes for DNS to propagate.

My next project on this is to add a photos section, and of course to return to a regular posting schedule. I’ve also decided to take the plunge into the mac world, and picked up a MacBook at the Apple store the other day. I’ll publish some posts on my experiences with that as well.