The Build Monkey Antipattern

Kief Morris has an interesting post on the build monkey antipattern. As someone who is currently working day-in and day-out on build systems, this is a risk that I see (and can hopefully avoid). I would maintain that having a person or team dedicated to improving the build system is not necessarily an antipattern, as long … Continue reading The Build Monkey Antipattern →

Joe on Gradle

There's a video of me talking about Gradle on the youDevise developer blog. Do I really sound like that?

Coming Soon: CITCON London 2010

The European version of CITCON (the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference) had a last minute change of plan, and has switched locations to London! This is one of my favourite conferences (see my notes on 2006 and 2009), and I'm really happy to see it coming back to London. Registrations have only been open for a week, but … Continue reading Coming Soon: CITCON London 2010 →

ASL Compatability Policy

An astute reader asked if the Ant Script Library will be updated to make use of any of the new features that will be available in the upcoming Ant 1.8 release. New features include enhancements to boolean properties, the import element to support optional imports, and new features such as include and target group. Many … Continue reading ASL Compatability Policy →

CITCON ’09: Better Ant Builds

The first session I attended (and partially ran) was Better Ant Builds. During the session proposals, Ivan Moore originally suggested a talk on better builds for Java programs. There were later proposals for sessions regarding improvements to Maven, so I proposed my own session "Better Ant Builds" to differentiate it from the Maven sessions. My … Continue reading CITCON ’09: Better Ant Builds →

Ant Script Library 1.1.0 Released

It's been over 6 months since the last release, so I'm well overdue for this: I've just released version 1.1.0 of the Ant Script Library. There are quite a number of small enhancements throughout the library, and I've been filling in missing documentation, too. Here's a summary of the major changes between version 1.0.2 and … Continue reading Ant Script Library 1.1.0 Released →

Trends in Build Metrics

I've been upgrading the Ant Script Library with a number of new code inspection reports, including FindBugs, Checkstyle and PMD Copy Paste Detection; this is on top of the existing PMD Analysis, Cobertura and JDepend reports. (Note that these updates have not yet been released). I was thinking about adding in Panopticode, too. I love … Continue reading Trends in Build Metrics →

Build Doctor Giveaway

The Build Doctor is running a competition to win some swag donated by Atlassian. The catch is you have to tell a short story about your best or worst (or best and worst) build/deployment experience. The deadline is this Friday, so get cracking!

Ant Script Library 1.0.2 Released

I've just released a new version of the Ant Script Library (1.0.2). The scripts themselves have only had a few incremental changes, but there has been a large amount of updates to the documentation (though there's still a long way to go there, I'm afraid). The major changes are: I've reworked the website to give … Continue reading Ant Script Library 1.0.2 Released →

Documenting Ant Scripts

I've had some fun evenings over the last week writing some documentation for the Ant Script Library. And by "fun", I actually mean "tedious". Unfortunately, this sort of thing is needed when you're writing build files that are intended for a wider audience. So far, I've managed to write some fairly complete documentation for the … Continue reading Documenting Ant Scripts →