Friday, July 31, 2009

Xtext meets Athena

The weather reports look pretty good for TMF Xtext: The sun has been shining for a few builds and hopefully this trend will continue.

Due to the fact, that the emft buildserver will be down permanently from August, 5th, Dennis migrated the Xtext build to the modeling integration server, which is more powerful and faster then the previous integration system. This worked out pretty well, but we ended up with the very same problem as before: One of our test projects tends to break the build because of an untrapped exception in the compiler. As we have no idea about the reasons of this sudden breakdown - the build was successful for a long time and broke one day without any recognizable modification or log entry, we decided to look out for other possibilities to run our integration tests.

One promising option was the Eclipse build server. After we got the build slots for the Athena common build, which is powered by the Hudson continuous integration engine, we gave it a serious try. Dennis did some night shifts to create the configuration for the Xtext build, Xpand and MWE and finally all three projects were green. That was a very good feeling.

It was straight forward to define dependencies on required projects that will trigger dependent builds and to configure schedules for nightly builds. My overall impression is, that this infrastructure is easier to handle than the modeling build, it's definitly a step forward. What I like most - besides the easy configuration and the fact that it just builds our project - are the neat statistics and the weather report icons that indicate the trend of a project. Maybe we finally heralded the summer?

No comments: