Customer Reviews

IBM Rational® ClearCase®, Ant, and CruiseControl: The Java™ Developer's Guide to Accelerating and Automating the Build Process

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"IBM Rational ClearCase, Ant and CruiseControl" walks the reader through setting up automated builds. It is useful if you are doing exactly what the book discusses. In particular, you should be using all three of these technologies and want to do standard builds.

The concepts were excellent. There was a strong emphasis on understanding the terminology. For examples, configuration management and build terms were clearly discussed. The roles involved were also described.

The author introduces code as constructs/idioms rather than as syntax. He calls these "best practices." I don't think of them as best practices, but the idioms are very useful in getting started quickly. Due to this approach, the book doesn't offer much instruction on customization.

The coverage of ClearCase was very thorough. The book includes both the Base ClearCase and ClearCase UCM. Ant and CruiseControl were covered enough to automate a standard J2EE build with ClearCase.

This book will save you a lot of time in getting an automated build working if you haven't used the technologies before. It supplements the materials available on the web nicely.

If you're a Java developer, you likely have (or should have) some sort of automated build process. IBM Rational ClearCase, Ant, and CruiseControl: The Java Developer's Guide to Accelerating and Automating the Build Process by Kevin A. Lee shows how this is done using these particular tools.

Contents:
Part 1 - Overview: Introduction to Software Build and Release Management
Part 2 - Environment: Tools of the Trade; Configuring Your SCM Environment
Part 3 - Definition: Defining Your Build and Release Scripts; Apache Ant Best Practices
Part 4 - Execution: Running Your Build Scripts; CruiseControl Best Practices
Part 5 - Reporting: Baseline and Change Request Reports; Build Reporting and Auditing
Part 6 - Release: The Art of Releasing; Release Packaging and Deployment
Part 7 - Conclusion: Putting It All Together
Glossary; Bibliography; Index

There are a multitude of tools out there that you can use to build your configuration management processes. This title uses the IBM Rational ClearCase tool as the source code repository, and Ant/CruiseControl to control the build process. It's not a definitive guide to any one of the software packages, but it's a very good blending of all three into a process that works well for making sure your software compiles and builds properly (and automatically). The concepts behind why build management is important are covered well, followed by detailed instructions on how to actually use the software. You could probably learn from this book if you had never dealt with Ant or anything else, but I get the feeling that some background in these areas would make the book a lot easier to understand. I could see this being a great book for someone who is switching from one repository tool (like Subversion) to ClearCase, and wants to know what they need to do to keep (or begin) their build management scripts.

Probably one of the better books out there on the overall process of automating your build process. If you haven't taken those steps to automate your builds, you really need to do something about that... :)

This is a straight-forward, to-the point reading. Version controlling approach and build processes are reflecting real-life situations. Code and processes are well documented.