Hudson – Continuous Integration made easy.. and free!

Some of you, developers, are acquainted with Continuous Integration, others do not, but one thing both have in common: the need of an easy mechanism to perform and monitor repetitive tasks in one or several projects. From building to testing, from keeping your project and dependencies versions right to logging the entire process, everything together is a task, an integration of from-development-to-deliver processes.

I didn’t know Continuous Integration itself, but everyday I have been dealing with something that resembles it. Man, it is a pain in the ass..

My employer made some colleagues of mine to use a tool – which name I can’t recall – but they keep complaining about it. So I wandered through the Web searching for something better. I found Hudson!

Hudson is a Java Web application very easy to “install”. All you have to do is to run java -jar hudson.war and there you go, point to http://localhost:8080 and you’ll have a very friendly management Web UI. Another way of running Hudson is through Java WebStart by running this file or installing it into a servlet container, like the one provided by Glassfish.

After you get it up and ready, you can start configuring you Hudson instance to match your development environment. For instance, let’s say you use:

• Maven/Ant/Nant – build tool;
• CVS/SVN/Git/Mercurial/Clearcase – SCM;
• JUnit/NUnit/Test-NG – unit-testing;
• Emma/Cobertura – code-coverage;
• Many others including Checkstyle, IRCbot or Jabber build triggers, e-mail and IM notifications and even the ability to fire-up a VMWare virtual-machine, build your project and shut it down.

Well Hudson is able to do that and much more, just check out their plug-in list! My favourite is the JIRA plug-in but unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a Bazaar plug-in and be truthfully happy.

Also it supports distributed builds and tracking dependency and release binaries versions. Isn’t it amazing? Well JBoss guys think so!

Give it a try and give me your feedback

Camurssas – A BoysBand do momento… há 7 anos atrás!!

Ehpah, pela primeira vez na minha vida senti-me a envelhecer!! Fui encontrar na net a minha primeira página Web (puro HTML + CSS, edited with vi).

Se querem rir um bocadinho leiam o Historial e ouçam as três músicas que “editámos” naquela altura:

• Amor Eterno
• Fadinho
• Caganêra

Deixem o vosso feedback! Façam-me sorrir mais um bocadinho..

Óbviamente que só podia ser fruto duma diarreia mental de uma mão cheia de cromos, incluíndo um antigo professor meu!

Firefox 3 Final for Mac OS X direct link

For those of you desperately looking for a direct link, here you go! Props to Luis Miranda, the micro-blogger n00b!

Laboratório p/ a Iniciativa de Software Aberto status?!

Estará o LISA morto? Não dispõem, por exemplo, do Firefox 2/3 nem do OpenOffice.org 2.3/4, nem mesmo do Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron… mas que choque tecnológico :’(

Switzerland 2 – 0 Portugal

It wasn’t an important match given that Portugal has already made to the quarters, yet there’s something in this particular match that made me somewhat suffer. The referee!

I’ve been in the field for some years and if there’s something as bad as a referee’s bad judgment it’s, like in this particular case, the lack of sensitiveness for the game. Alright, it’s a sport, and as such it has rules, but we must not forget we’re not machines, and that sports are meant to provide fun. So why break all that fun and magic by taking the rules so seriously and making players act like robots?

I hate people that take sports as money as well as I hated the Switzerland – Portugal referee. It’s people like you that takes us the pleasure of living football!!

Portugal 3 – 1 Czech Republic

Portugal 2 – 0 Turkey

Voice and Video support for Pidgin and Adium – is it coming?!

As wandering through my feed I got to Pidgin developer Hylke Bons blog post, where Hylke passes the message that Voice and Video support is coming soon to Pidgin. If this is true, and I’ve no reason to suspect otherwise, libpurple is the repo where the inners of this so long-awaited feature is under development.The same libpurple is the core for many other IM applications, namely one of the most famous Mac OS X IM clients, Adium.

So, can we expect Voice and Video support coming soon? How many of you are waiting for this feature?

Eclipse on Mac OS X is down. Bring on Netbeans!!

Eclipse has been my preferred IDE for a while now, at work and home. I use it mainly for Java development, focusing on Enterprise Edition oriented version 3.3, Europa.

Recently, I installed it over my Macbook running Mac OS X. The problems started right away! I needed to install the Android plug-in so I followed the official instructions. Eclipse plug-in installer kept failing on me complaining about some other plug-in dependencies breakage even that all I did was selecting Android’s plug-in. I tried other plug-ins and even updating Eclipse using the official way (Help -> Software Update), but the behavior was the same.

As a good developer should do, I started looking on Eclipse’s bugzilla and after some wandering I finally hit it. Can you see what the Eclipse developer did? He told me that “Europa is around for some time” and so “they would have run into it”.. WTF? What does this means? That I’m loosing my mind? That the other guy that reported this situation is highly on dope? Come on..

Well, I’m going for Netbeans!