This is a book by Mike Clark. It deals with automatically building, deploying and monitoring Java applications. The book first discusses what to automate and why. Within the wiki I discuss Continuous Integration (https://www.gridshore.nl/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.ContinuousIntegration). This book discusses all parts of continous integration:
– One step builds (using a standard directory structure, building with ant, automatic unit tests with junit and ant)
– Schedules builds (using cruisecontrol builds are created on time with reporting as well)
– Push button releases (version control systems are important, a release contains executable code as well as documentation)
– Installation and deployment
– Monitoring
Every part is discussed while using a tool. A few important remarks from the book:
CRISP builds :
Complete – No manual actions necessary to create a build and run tests
Repeatable – You should be able to recreate previous builds
Informative – If a build fails comments should be as obvious to find the problem
Schedulable – It must be possible to schedule a build on a certain interval or at a certain time
Portable – It should be to difficult to port the build to another machine
A remark that is made about releases, is: Release early and often. It is very important to test your release procedure as well as the releases as early as possible. It is good to have a daily release. (Nightly build)
There is also some help on installation, a good advice is to provide customers with some kind of test application that reads the configurations, and checks if the application is installed correct. This can provide you with just the right amount of information to get to the problem quickly.
It was a very fun book to read and good to complete or start your ‘Project Automation’