TimShadel.com

Mike Clark is wondering:

Which RubyGems are you sporting?

So my current list is down below. I imagine it will change soon — maybe tomorrow.

gem list | grep “^[a-zA-Z]“

actionmailer (1.3.2, 1.3.1, 1.2.5)
actionpack (1.13.2, 1.13.1, 1.12.5)
actionwebservice (1.2.2, 1.2.1, 1.1.6)
activerecord (1.15.2, 1.15.1, 1.14.4)
activesupport (1.4.1, 1.4.0, 1.3.1)
aws-s3 (0.3.0, 0.2.0)
BlueCloth (1.0.0)
builder (2.0.0)
capistrano (1.4.0, 1.3.0, 1.2.0)
cgi_multipart_eof_fix (2.1)
daemons (1.0.4, 1.0.3)
ezcrypto (0.7)
fastthread (0.6.3)
gem_plugin (0.2.2, 0.2.1)
hoe (1.2.0)
hpricot (0.5, 0.4)
libxml-ruby (0.3.8.4, 0.3.8)
mechanize (0.6.4)
mime-types (1.15)
mongrel (1.0.1, 0.3.13.4)
mongrel_cluster (0.2.1)
needle (1.3.0)
net-sftp (1.1.0)
net-ssh (1.0.10)
rails (1.2.2, 1.2.1, 1.1.6)
rake (0.7.1)
RAliasFile (0.1.0)
rubyforge (0.4.0)
rubyosa (0.2.0, 0.1.0)
sources (0.0.1)
wirble (0.1.2)
xml-simple (1.0.10)
ZenTest (3.4.3)

1. Download winstone from it’s Sourceforge Files page
2. Download the Hudson war file from its Java.net Release page
3. Then run java -jar winstone-0.9.6.jar --warfile=hudson.war --httpPort=8081
4. You should see something like the screenshot below.
5. Play.

One of my favorite features of Hudson is the ability to watch the console output of a build in progress, like this one:

Other cool things include:

• No more messing around with XML
• I can setup a Hudson job and use it to run mvn release:clean release:prepare on my branch code. (Haven’t tried this beyond tinkering yet, though. Could possibly be manual or nightly job it seems.)
• It’s easy to have several builds for different branches and see them all at once.
• There’s a really cool build history graph that shows both the time it took to build each release, and whether it passed or failed — makes it easy to see your build trends on the team.

I’m looking forward to investigating it’s publishing of Javadoc and JUnit test results. I also want to see if it’ll do anything with Maven’s site generation. If so, that’d be a big win. I’ve fiddled with Continuum, but this just feels like a better setup to me, and the author seems eager to add Maven2 integration to it.

After having it around for a couple weeks, I’ve tentatively switch our build to use it. It’s just so easy to turn on, that it seems like a no brainer. If it doesn’t pan out then we can always turn CruiseControl back on, but I don’t anticipate that outcome. Something else I might try is to drop Hudson into Tomcat if winstone seems to strain, but I don’t think we’ll need that either. It’s built our stuff plenty fast in that little servlet container for a few weeks now, so I’m not anticipating any load increase to it — simply more publicity for it among our team.

Try it out. Let me know if you think it’s worth the switch.

Tonight we’ll be deploying the first beta of a major new feature of our product that my team’s been working on since September. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve release updates to our product every two weeks. Our branching strategy is such that we have one month cycles on /trunk that branch on release, and are followed up by a second release two weeks later with some new functionality, but no major restructuring. That keeps us building along happily every two weeks with a way to take on bigger work on the four week branch.

Pieces of it have been growing in the app for some time, but tonight we flip on the central piece for a few small groups. We had a hectic day yesterday, and ultimately discovered a networking problem two teams away that prevented us from hitting our well-publicized deadline last night (always make sure to setup your QA environment as closely as possible to your production environment). All that should be resolved today. Everything’s done.

Now there’s nothing more to do for this release but sit and wait to see which way the wind blows.