unethical blogger

Being a big fan of "continuous integration", particularly with Hudson, I've often thought about the possibilities of turning it into a business. It's no surprise really, my first commercial application as a rogue Mac software developer was a product called BuildFactory which, while fun to build, never sold all that many licenses. With the advent of Amazon's EC2 service and the transition of these cloud computing resources into a building block for many businesses, I've long thought about the idea of building "continuous integration as a service."

At face value the idea sounds incredibly fun to build, I'll build a service that integrates with GitHub, Google Code, SourceForge and private source control systems. The end (paying) user would "plug-in" to the "continuous integration grid", they'd work throughout the day, committing code and then the CI grid would pick up those changes, build releases and run tests against a number of different architecture, automatically detecting failures and reporting them back to the developers. It involves some of my favorite challenges in programming:

• Scaling up
• Efficiently using cycles, and only when needed
• Building and testing cross-architecture and cross-platform

Unfortunately, it's a crap business idea, I now have second-hand confirmation from a group of guys who've attempted the concept.

Some users of Hudson have already started to notice a subtle addition to the latest release, 1.343, a new background watermark image.

The commit message (r26728) from Kohsuke, the incredibly talented founder and maintainer of the Hudson project, adds a bit of sadness to the whole affair:

In tribute to Sun Microsystems and all my colleagues who had to go today. I hope the community would forgive me for doing this.

Given the incredible speed at which the tech industry grows and moves, it's easy to forget that there are a number of talented engineers that have spent their careers at Sun building technologies that have helped change the face of modern computing, regardless of whether or not Sun could figure out how to sell them: SunOS/Solaris, Java, DTrace, SPARC 64-bit chips, Sun Grid Engine, JRuby, the W3C XML specification, ZFS, OpenOffice (acquisition), MySQL (acquisition), and VirtualBox (acquisition).

As a corporation, I personally think Sun was a failure, as a foundation of engineering in Silicon Valley, I think Sun has been quite successful.

To those that are being pushed out as part of the merger with Oracle, I want to sincerely thank you for your contributions to computing and wish you the best of luck.

A few months ago Kohsuke, author of the Hudson continuous integration server, introduced me to the concept of the "pre-tested commit", a feature of the TeamCity build management and continuous integration system. The concept is simple, the build system stands as a roadblock between your commit entering trunk and only after the build system determines that your commit doesn't break things does it allow the commit to be introduced into version control, where other developers will sync and integrate that change into their local working copies. The reasoning and workflow put forth by TeamCity for "pre-tested commits" is very dependent on a centralized version control system, it is solving an issue Git or Mercurial users don't really run into. Those using Git can commit their hearts out all day long and it won't affect their colleagues until they merge their commits with others.

In some cases, allowing buggy or broken code to be merged in from another developer's Git repository can be worse than in a central version control system, since the recipient of the broken code might perform a knee-jerk git-revert(1) command on the merge!

Last week @admc, despite being a big proponent of Windmill, needed to use WatiN for a change. WatiN has the distinct capability of being able to work with Internet Explorer's HTTPS support as well as frames, a requirement for the task at hand. As adorable as it was to watch @admc, a child of the dynamic language revolution, struggle with writing in C# with Visual Studio and the daunting "Windows development stack," the prospect of a language shift at Slide towards C# on Windows is almost laughable. Since Slide is a Python shop, IronPython became the obvious choice.

Out of an hour or so of "extreme programming" which mostly entailed Adam watching as I wrote IronPython in his Windows VM, IronWatin was born. IronWatin itself is a very simple test runner that hooks into Python's "unittest" for creating integration tests with WatiN in a familiar environment.

I intended IronWatin to be as easy as possible for "native Python" developers, by abstracting out updates to sys.path to include the Python standard lib (adds the standard locations for Python 2.5/2.6 on Windows) as well as adding WatiN.Core.dll via clr.AddReference() so developers can simply import IronWatin; import WatiN.Core and they're ready to start writing integration tests.

Once upon a time I was lucky enough to take an "Intro to C++" class taught by none other than Bjarne Stroustrop himself, while I learned a lot of things about what makes C++ good and sucky at the same time, he also taught a very important lesson: great engineers are lazy. It's fairly easy to enumerate functionality in tens of hundreds of lines of poorly organized, inefficient code, but (according to Bjarne) it's the great engineers that are capable of distilling that functionality into it's most succinct form. I've since taken this notion of being "ultimately lazy" into my professional career, making it the root answer for a lot of my design decisions and choices: "Why bother writing unit tests?" I'm too lazy to fire up the whole application and click mouse buttons, and I can only do that so fast; "Why do you only work with Vim in GNU/screen?" I can't be bothered to set up a new slew of terminals when I switch machines, and so on down the line.

Earlier this week I found another bit of manual work that I shouldn't be doing and should be lazy about: building. The local build is something that's common to every single software developer regardless of language, Slide being a Python shop, we have a bit more subtle of a "build", that is to say, developers implicitly run a "build" when they hit a page in Apache or a test/script. I found myself constantly switching between two terminal windows, one with my editor (Vim) and one for running tests and other scripts.

At the Hudson Bay Area Meetup/Hackathon that Slide, Inc. hosted last weekend, I worked on the Jython plugin and released it just days after releasing a strikingly similar plugin, the Python plugin. I felt that an explanation might be warranted as to why I would do such a thing.

For those that don't know, Hudson is a Java-based continuous integration server, one of the best CI servers developed (in my humblest of opinions). What makes Hudson so great is a very solid plugin architecture allowing developers to extend Hudson to support a wide variety of scripting languages as well as notifiers, source control systems, and so on (related post on the growth of Hudson's plugin ecosystem). Additionally, Hudson supports slaves on any operating system that Java supports, allowing you to have a central manager (the "master" Hudson server/node) and a vast network of different machines performing tasks and executing jobs. Now that you're up to speed, back to the topic at hand.

Jython versus Python plugin. Why bother with either, as @gboissinot pointed out in this tweet? The interesting thing about the Jython plugin, particularly when you use a large number of slaves is that with the installation of the Jython plugin, suddenly you have the ability to execute Python script on every single slave, regardless of whether or not they actually have Python installed. The more "third party" that can be moved into Hudson by way of the plugin system means reduced dependencies and difficulty setting up slaves to help handle load.

Take the "git" versus the "git2" plugin, the git plugin was recently criticized on the #hudson channel because of it's use of the JGit library, versus "git2" which invokes git(1) on the command line. The latter approach is flawed for a number of reasons, particularly the reliance on the git command line executables and scripts to return consistent formatting is specious at best even if you aren't relying on "porcelain" (git community terminology for front-end-ish script and code sitting on top of the "plumbing", the breakdown is detailed here). The command-line approach also means you now have to ensure every one of your slaves that are likely to be executing builds have the appropriate packages installed. One the flipside however, with the JGit-based approach, the Hudson slave agent can transfer the appropriate bytecode to the machine in question and execute that without relying on system-dependencies.

The Hudson Subversion plugin takes a similar approach, being based on SVNKit.

Being a Python developer by trade, I am certainly not in the "Java Fanboy" camp, but the efficiencies gained by incorporating Java-based libraries in Hudson plugins and extensions is a no brainer, the reduction of dependencies on the systems incorporated in your build farm will save you plenty of time in maintenance and version woes alone. In my opinion, the benefits of JGit, Jython, SVNKit, and the other Java-based libraries that are running some of the most highly used plugins in the Hudson ecosystem continue to outweigh the costs, especially as we find ourselves bringing more and more slaves online.