Difference between revisions of "SoC geeklog2 continuous builds"

Revision as of 17:16, 24 March 2008

Incentive

Geeklog 2 is a sophisticated system. A balance between rich features and ease of use must be struck which places a high emphasis on quality. A big part of establishing quality is to implement testing as a core part of the project. Additionally, there are key parts to the Geeklog 2 that require special processing such as building the models (the "M" part of MVC). Geeklog 2 makes heavy use of Propel, an object relational mapper, to limit the amount of SQL a developer has to write and enhancements to Propel make it possible to isolate all SQL from the rest of the system.

Because of these and a number of other complexities having a system in place that polls SVN for changes, checks out the code, runs unit tests and produces builds (i.e. PEAR-installable packages) would take some of the time and complexity with getting a new version out and it forces testing to be an integral part of the system.

Objective

• Research Open Source build tools such as Phing, Xinc and Cruise Control to provide continuous builds
• Establish the actual build process including
  • Checking out code from SVN
  • Running Unit tests
  • Running regression tests
  • Upon test failures notification of the development team
  • Upon successful testing tagging the code and doing full builds

Goals

• Define the requirements we have of a build tool
• Systematically compare products available
• Define our exact build process
• Pick the best tool
• Implement it against the process we defined

Level of Difficulty

Hard

Continuous builds in PHP is a relatively new concept. A good candidate must be willing to push forward and trudge new ground in a developing area within the PHP community.

Further Reading

• Phing
• Xinc
• CruiseControl
• BuildBot
• Continuum
• Buildman
• Continious Integration