Anthill looks pretty spiffy
by Kevin Dangoor
Looking to turn on automated builds, I started looking at Cruise Control yesterday. The documentation left a little to be desired and before I had gotten too far I searched to see what other docs there were. That’s when I encountered Anthill, which is an automated build system that runs in a webapp. Anthill is available in both open source and commercial versions. Deploying Anthill was very quick and easy, and all configuration could be done through the web.
I did run into a problem with JDK versions, because we have one project that is 1.3 and others that are 1.4. Anthill Pro ($1,299) allows you to select which JDK to use for each project (plus many other features over the open source version). We’re not ready to commit that much money to the tool. It looks straightforward to add that one feature in, though.
Which leads to an interesting question… Does a vendor with open source and commercial versions of a product accept patches to the open source version that add features that previously only existed in the commercial one?
CC docs aren’t that great but did you see the wiki? http://c2.com/w4/cc/wiki.cgi?WelcomeVisitors
I’ve played with both and in the end I found Anthill to be buggy and CC to have features and a config style that make the investment in learning well worth it.
Actually, I hadn’t seen that wiki. Thanks for the link!
In my initial run through, Anthill worked as expected with no bugs that I saw. I will take another look at CC after reading the wiki.