Chapter 15. Continuous integration
This chapter covers:
This book has now covered the entire process of building an application with Ant, from a simple library with a few unit tests, to a server-side application that’s tested by running functional tests on a client or by running unit tests inside the application server.
There’s one more thing that Ant enables that can transform how your project works. Instead of running the builds by hand, why not delegate all the work to a machine? A machine that can rerun the builds and tests nightly, hourly, or whenever you feel the need? Running builds repeatedly is useful, but far too boring to do by hand. That’s the kind of dull, repetitive work that machines are for, and where Ant can help.
This chapter is going to cover setting up a machine to run builds for you, not just to save developer time but also to transform your entire development process. It’s a bit of a change from the previous chapters, as there are more screen shots than XML listings. This doesn’t make it any less important. Indeed, the earlier a project sets up a continuous-integration system, the better.
This chapter will use Luntbuild, which is a web application that can be set up to run Ant builds on demand. But before we can get down to the application itself, we have to understand the concept of continuous integration.