Questions are at the bottom. ================================== Summary:
I am considering trying to build a rather large multiproject maven build in a distributed fashion. I am looking for guidance on how to best achieve this with a minimal amount of effort. In particular I am looking for where to hook into the maven reactor during a multiproject build. ================================== Anticipated Design: My anticipated approach is the following: 1) Share out the work directory on each developer's MS Windows based workstation. 2) Build a simple JavaSpaces service that invokes an arbitrary maven goal in a specified remote directory. The entity placed on the JavaSpace by a developer's build will identify the developer's machine, the developer's work directory, and the maven target to invoke. The JavaSpace's service will either use it's own copy of maven or it will leverage a copy of maven in the developer's work directory in a known location. When the service completes running the maven target it will report its completion (including success/failure information) by placing an appropriate entity on the JavaSpace. The JavaSpaces service would be installed on a handful of cheap PC's dedicated to distributed maven builds. 3) Build an appropriate maven plugin that communicates with the JavaSpaces service. This plugin should leverage maven's existing multiproject functionality in order to understand the inter-project dependencies. It is hope this can be done with minimal effort. ================================== Notes: 1) I am only concerned with building projects in parallel. There is no need to complicate the design by supporting distributed builds within a project. 2) The developer's interaction with the distributed build should be through maven. The usage should be similar to that of using the multiproject plugin. The only difference is the multiproject-distrib plugin would actually be farming work out to the build boxes. 3) It is expected the CPU and memory resources of the build servers will be the greatest performance bottleneck and the disk I/O of the developer's workstation will not initially be a problem. When/if disk I/O becomes a problem the work directory can be kept in sync with a few remote copies. 4) Current build time is dominated by JUnit tests not compilation. There may be some value in compiling first and running tests second. This will help parallelize the most time consuming portion of the build. (Performance issues with JUnit tests are a nice problem to have.) 5) The design chosen should be very simple to build and maintain. The only reason I'm interested in solving this problem is the build cycle has become painfully slow (15min or more) and is affecting agility. I don't want to get sucked into build management, I just want the builds to go faster. Complete builds under 1 or 2 minutes would make me very happy. A continuous integration environment can make snapshots available, but thats still not quite the same as running all the junit tests across all the projects. (Although it would be better than 15 minute builds.) ================================== Relevant knowledge: 1) I have lots of experience writing custom Ant tasks. 2) Very little development experience with maven plugins, but work with people who have written several. (i.e. I don't really know Jelly well.) 3) Don't know much about JavaSpaces, but the examples look pretty simple. As my problem is fairly simple I can probably do what I need without getting into the nitty gritty of JINI. It looks like JavaSpaces is simple but learning JINI well is like learning EJBs well. It does seem that a Linda engine is the easiest way to solve my problem. ================================== Questions: 1) Where do I hook into maven:reactor to figure out the build dependencies? Where is the documentation for the maven:reactor goal? Where is the file that tells me what java classes are associated with the maven:reactor goal?. 2) Is there any open-source project (maven plugin) out there that has already solved this problem? So far I havn't been able to find anything close other than rant and AntSpaces (http://www.oopsconsultancy.com/software/antspaces/). 3) If I can't find dedicated build boxes, I need to have the JavaSpace service only run when a PC has it's screen locked. Any recommendations here? I can't even think of how I can figure this out inside of a Java application. Such low level system information isn't typically exposed to Java. Maybe someone has already written something that takes care of the problem for me. Could use guidance here. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
