Tool News, February 2010
• Julian Simpson
There's a new Hudson out. It's got 7 bug fixes and 3 enhancements, including some profiling and optimisation work to speed up the UI.
Atlassian have embarked on a Build Engineer hiring offensive. They seem to be based in Sydney. Atlassian would appear to be a great place to work.
Electric Cloud have released new versions of ElectricAccelerator (now at version 5) and ElectricCommander (at version 3). The former works with make, MSBuild, scons and the like to parallelize the build. There's a new feature in Electrify, a private cloud that allows to to parallelize more software production. I think they're on the money with the private cloud. Cloud services may be the meme du jour, but cloud technologies used internally would be the way to for many companies to start.
Scott Castle:
Electrify is interesting because it's a seamless way to tap into distributed computing, and it's not tied to using a specific build tool. If you've looked at the various efforts to build Ant tasks in parallel, or to upgrade Maven for parallel execution, they all focus on local-box parallelism, leaving out the tricky task of distribution across hosts. Electrify bridges the gap, converting any parallel task into a distributed task, and it has all the network, caching, and management 'nice-to-haves' that homebuilt systems generally lack.
ElectricCommander looks like it aims to be the tool to make build and release managers redundant. And if that means not doing deployments for other people, I'm not bothered. I'm surprised that the tool hasn't had more coverage as it seems squarely in the same arena as Cruise and Ant Hill Pro. Today's release brings a lot of customisation: here's Dax Fahang, (who came to Citcon Paris, some readers may recall):
Developers are often resistant to the introduction of new tools or processes, so we find that customizability is critical to adoption. With ElectricCommander 3.5, users truly have a build-test-deploy system that works and looks exactly the way they want it to without all the traditional effort and costs associated with customization of a homegrown system. Version 3.5 allows customers to customize the UI without any application language or upgrade constraints - thus enabling Commander to easily look like a legacy tool, integrate data from multiple applications, and provide role-based user experiences.