Sweet iPhone Continuous Integration App
• Julian Simpson
Douglas and John from Higher Order Bit have written an iPhone app that tells you what your Continuous Integration server is doing.
That isn't so unusual, I wrote about one some time ago. But rather than just focus on one CI server, they've done the legwork to support four different servers, and they plan to keep going. Right now they support every flavour of CruiseControl (.java, .NET and .rb), Hudson and they are looking for opinions (see the poll on their website) on which to do next.
Says Douglas:
our goals were to allow users to check build statuses as quickly as possible and to accommodate "special" CI setups. To those ends we wanted to make it easy to navigate to builds on different servers, hide builds that you aren't actively monitoring and support one-click updates. By one-click updates, I mean that on many occasions you should just have to open the app to see what you care about.
I tried a review copy it against my CruiseControl server and it worked nicely. The CruiseControl dashboard has an issue where it displays projects in the RSS feed that are long dead. You can drop these by using the 'Edit' button and unticking these builds that just won't die.
Adding servers is very straightforward. You do need to know the proper RSS feed to use. That caught me out. Ideally it would take a guess at the kind of server it's connecting to and guess the gory details of the URL. The blog editor that I am writing this post in (Blogo) does this. You just need to pass the basic URL of your blog service. Anyway, I suggested this change to the guys.
I think there may be a need for some organisations to publish some build state to the public internet, which might prevent some corporate use for the moment.
On the whole I'm quite happy with the app. It's worth more than the $1/£0.59 that it costs right now, so go and buy it now!