Željko Filipin's Blog on Software and Testing

Yesterday I was at Ruby at Six #2 at Infinum (in Zagreb, Croatia), organized by Nikica Jokić. About 30 people showed up, like the last time.

There were 4 short talks about NoSQL by Damir Bulić, Coffescript by Josip Bišćan, backbone.js by Tomislav Capan, and Mislav Marohnić was supposed to talk about Git but I think he changed the title of his talk to “except on Internet Explorer“. (You had to be there.)

The talks were interesting, but even more interesting were informal conversations after the talks. There was also free homebrew beer. We went home after 10pm, I think that says how interesting the conversations were.

I think this was one of the best meetups I have ever been. The next one will be next month. I hope Ruby at Six will become a tradition.

If you want to continue the conversation, go to ruby-hr Google group or #rubyat6/#rubyatsix at Twitter.

I have finished reading Jenkins: The Definitive Guide book today. It took me a while to realize there is free pdf version of the book (and $34.99-$49.49 print and ebook versions).

What is Jenkins? From their web site:

In a nutshell Jenkins CI (formerly known as Hudson) is the leading open-source continuous integration server.

The book covers everything you need to know. How to install, use and maintain it. There is also a few chapters about continuous integration in general. I have just scanned chapters on Java specific topics.

I was reading the book and working on setting up Jenkins, just the way I like to learn. First in a virtual machine on my laptop, then on a real server somewhere in Switzerland.

Almost in every chapter I was surprised to learn how powerful Jenkins is. It can do almost anything you need, and all of it can be done from your favorite browser. I plan to write more about how I use Jenkins as soon as I get more experience with it.

At the moment, Jenkins is checking our Git repository every minute. If there are new commits it pulls them and builds the application. If the build is successful it runs a suite of Watir tests. For a while, it was sendin e-mail if build fails to the person that made the last check in. I have disabled it because links in e-mail messages were broken, since Jenkins was installed in a virtual machine on my laptop. I will also investigate distributed builds, if this machine becomes too busy.

The goal is to have automatic builds and one click deploy to production.

At the end, I did not have a lot of trouble installing or using Jenkins, it is pretty straightforward. I had some Git problems, but managed to resolve them. The majority of the work was in adjusting our rake build script to work with Jenkins.

In short, if you need a continuous integration server, I would recommend Jenkins. If you want to read a book about it, I would recommend this book.

I have released Watir Book 0.7.1 in PDF, EPUB (iPad, iPhone, iPod) and MOBI (Kindle) format.

You can download the free version of the book from GitHub for free.

You can buy the whole book via PayPal for 9$. Since the book is not finished yet, you will get all updates to the book for free. If you already bought the book, I have sent it to you via e-mail.

Major changes since the last release:

- driving opera on Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.5

You can see all the changes at GitHub.

Release 0.7 (September 17) had 156 downloads. Not bad.

One person bought the book this month. If two more people buy the book this month, I will buy Mac OS X 10.7 and cover installation for it.