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An Interview with CruiseControl config project founder Allan Wick
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Article Topics
What is CruiseControl config? · Where is the project going? Page 1 of 2
What is CruiseControl config?
On a recent trip to Milwaukee, Stelligent’s President, Andrew Glover, had the opportunity to chat with Allan Wick, the founder and lead developer on the CruiseControl config project, which provides a configuration and monitoring mechanism for CruiseControl.
Stelligent: Tell us about your
project- what problem does it solve? If I’ve already embraced CI and am
using CruiseControl, why would I want to use CruiseControl config?
Allan: A little background first: the CruiseControl configuration tool started about a year ago, after I read Mike Clark's book on Project Automation.
I had been using CruiseControl for several years before that, and at
the time, there was very little documentation on project configuration.
I wrote a document explaining how to get a project up and running on
version 2.2 of CruiseControl. This document was used to start the
documentation site, which was then transferred into the current Confluence Wiki site.
After reading Mike's book, I decided I wanted to contribute to
CruiseControl, since I had been using it for so long and had some time
to work on open-source projects. I contacted the CruiseControl
developers on the mailing list and was led to some code that they had
started developing, which was a Swing based configuration tool. I used
some of their code as a base to build a configuration tool that made
working with the XML based configuration file much easier.
The tool will allow you to point at a config.xml file through the
file system, edit the contents of the config.xml file in a nice GUI
interface, and save the contents back to the file-system. I always find
myself going back to the configuration html help file while configuring
projects, so the help file is shown in the tool and positioned to the
section that relates to the node you are currently working on.
With the 2.3.1 release of CruiseControl, the configuration file was exposed through the JMX console. You don't even need to know where the configuration file is on the server.
The tool also has the ability to monitor the status of your
CruiseControl server in a little nicer GUI interface. Again, using the
JMX interface to the server, the tool is able to display a nice
overview of all the projects that are currently running and their
status. You are also able to monitor several different servers if you
have more than one to manage. The icon in the frame of the tool changes
color based on the status of the projects running on the server. For
Windows users, there is also a tray icon that can be used to notify of
server(s) status(es).
The latest version also added a tabbed interface for the configuration
of the projects on the server. You don't need to navigate down through
a tree to find a node to update. This makes it a lot easier to find
what you are looking for. A wizard was added as well to help guide you
through creating a new project.
So, for the CruiseControl user, this tool will allow you to view
and configure the projects on your server, as well as monitor their
statuses, using a nice rich-client application.
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