We found a working solution in a combination of a custom Ant plugin for Maven, Maven as build tool, shell scripts and Luntbuild. It took us quiet a while to figure it all out and get it right, but now we are deploying multiple versions each night and can also trigger deployments manually. In this post I am going to show how we solved it.

1. Ant Plugin for Maven
We were not able to find existing Maven plugins for the tasks of copying, unpacking and remotely managing applications, so we decided to write our own Ant Plugin for Maven, which allowed us to use tasks like sshexec and scp.
The plugin basically only needs 3 files: an 
ant build script, a mapping document and of course Maven’s POM. The image below shows the Eclipse project for the plugin.

The ant script rollout.build.xml performs tasks like SSH commands and SCP and accepts various parameters, which allow us to use it in a very flexible way. In the code example below, you can see two targets, one for the web applications and one for the daemon processes.

In order to use the ant script, a mapping document has to be created to tell Maven how to use our plugin.

Because we use SSH/SCP, ant-jsch and jsch have to be added as dependencies to the pom.xml of the plugin. Here we also specified the more user-friendly prefix ‘rollout’, so that we can reference our new plugin with rollout:daemon and rollout:webapp. Don’t forget to update settings.xml when using the prefix.

If you want to to execute the script automatically as part of one of the Maven lifecycles, you can add the plugin to the pom.xml of your project as described in the Guide to Developing Ant Plugins. Originally we used the ’site’ lifecycle to create the project sites and deploy the application as well but that slowed the deployment process down too much. Sometime you want to be able to release a new version as fast as possible.

2. Shell scripts for starting/stopping applications
On the test server we are using standard shell scripts to manage the applications. Just as the ant script, these shell scripts accept various parameters, so we can use them for multiple deployments.

3. Luntbuild

In Luntbuild – an open source build automation and management tool – we bring the loose ends together and configure the dynamic parameters for the build and deployment process. The project/scheduler concept of Luntbuild combined with a series of builders make it easy to handle multiple versions of our software.

For the nightly deployment on trunk we use a schedule (screenshot below), which first builds the project (clean install) and then post-build process will setup a database on the test server and deploy all 9 applications.

The builder then uses Maven to execute the deployment goal of our plugin and provides the necessary parameters. As you can see, it is possible to pass parameters from the schedule to the builder and this way it is possible to re-use the builder in many ways. Unfortunately it is not possible to share builders between projects in Luntbuild.

Conclusion

With this workflow we were able to achieve our goal. Deployment is now part of our continuous integration system. Every night each release which is in development is automatically being deployed to our test servers and if necessary we can manually start deployments during the day. All of this saved a lot of time and trouble. It is a very flexible and expandable solutions but the flexibility also added some complexity.

What is missing now are the setup and configuration steps for the test systems and databases. At the moment there are still some manual steps necessary to get a new deployment environment ready.

Bookmark It

Thanks to virtualization you can install Oracle 10g Express on a Linux or Windows VM and use it from the Mac side (your Java application, Eclipse,…).

I used Ubuntu Ultimate 1.4 on VMware Fusion. Before you can install Oracle 10g express, you have to increase the swap size. In my case the installer reported that the Express Edition requires 750 MB of swap space. I followed these instructions and increased the swap space to 800MB. Since I wanted to use the universal release, I used ‘apt-get install oracle-xe-universal’ to install Oracle (Oracle also offers RPM packages). The rest is straight forward. Just follow the instructions. As you can see in the screenshot, I can contact the 10g database from SQL Developer running on Mac OS X on the same machine. The Ubuntu windows shows the web-interface of Oracle.

I ran the same maven build again (clean install with database scripts and full tests) and now the time went down to 2:50 (from 3:30 with a remote database). The Core 2 Duo of my MacBook Pro had to work hard and memory usage went up to 1.5 GB, but there was enough room to continue working.

So, this is great. Now I have a completely independent mobile software development platform.

Bookmark It

Build speed matters as you see and it was one reason for me to buy a new MacBook Pro to replace my 2 year old PowerBook, which just became too slow for software development as well as other common tasks.

So, today I ran a small unscientific competition between my two systems on our current project, which uses Maven 2 to build and a Oracle 10g database. To reduce dependency on the network connection to the database server (via VPN), I installed a local Oracle 10g Express on separate machine. Later I will try to install the same on a VM.

With maven I ran a clean installation including all tests a couple of times, also to make sure all dependencies have been resolved.

The PowerBook (1.67Ghz G4, 1.5MB RAM, 100Mbit connection) needs on average 7 minutes (it took more than 20 minutes with the VPN connection!). The new MacBook Pro (2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB, WLAN connection) finishes the same task in 3 1/2 minutes, which is an acceptable speed. Just run your tests when you get a fresh cup of coffee (you should not sit behind the desk without a break anyhow).

It is also nice, that Eclipse 3.x with MyEclipse and some other plug-ins starts 14 seconds faster on the MacBook Pro.

Considering the costs of development hours, esp. if bugs are not caught on time because skipped testing, I think it is foolish to save money on hardware for software developers. Give them the best and fastest you can get. It will not only motivate them (we love good technology) but also improve productivity and probably quality as well.

Bookmark It

• Download Maven 1.0.2
• Unpack maven-1.0.2.tar.gz in /usr/local as super user
  sudo tar xzvf maven-1.0.2.tar.gz
• Add JAVA_HOME, MAVEN_HOME and MAVEN_OPTS to your environment variables.
  In order to set environment variables on Mac OS X, create a .MacOSX folder in your home directory and add a file named environment.plist. The environment file uses the XML/plist format and can be edited with Apple’s Property List Editor, which is a part of the development tools. U can also use a handy tool called RCEnvironment.
  touch ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist
open ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist
  On my iMac at work I originally used
  /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home
  as JAVA_HOME but after some updates it stopped working, so I am using /usr now. Basically you should also be able to use
  /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home/
  which points to the current JavaVM.
  MAVEN_HOME and MAVEN_OPTS are optional.
  When you change the environment.plist settings, you will have to logout and log back in to activate them. Alternatively you can also specify the environmental settings in
  ~/.cshrc or ~/.tcshrc and it will be used by any tcsh shell you launch.
• Add maven to your path. I did this in my .bash_login file, which now looks like this (all on one line):
  export PATH="/usr/local/maven-2.0.3/bin:
/usr/local/maven-1.0.2/bin:/usr/local/bin:
/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"
• Type maven -v in the terminal. If everything is working, you should see something like this:
  __ __
| \/ |__ _Apache__ ___
| |\/| / _` \ V / -_) ' \ ~ intelligent projects ~
|_| |_\__,_|\_/\___|_||_| v. 1.0.2

In Eclipse we use the Meven IDE but if you are going to use Maven 2.x, you will probably go for the new Plug-in for Eclipse. I usually build the projects with maven on the command line.

Bookmark It