Apache Gump is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 continuous integration

Continuous integration

In software engineering, continuous integration implements continuous processes of applying quality control — small pieces of effort, applied frequently...

 system, which aims to build and test all the open source Java projects, every night. Its aim is to make sure that all the projects are compatible, at both the API level and in terms of functionality matching specifications. It is hosted at gump.apache.org, and runs every night on the official Sun JVM.

Usage

To join Gump, a project must provide two XML files. One describes how to access the live CVS

Concurrent Versions System

The Concurrent Versions System , also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, is a client-server free software revision control system in the field of software development. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers ...

 or Subversion repository; the other what to build from the repository, and the artifacts produced. Each project can be dependent upon other projects; these dependencies are declared so that Gump knows the correct order to build things.

Gump can build shell script

Shell script

A shell script is a script written for the shell, or command line interpreter, of an operating system. It is often considered a simple domain-specific programming language...

, Ant

Apache Ant

Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. It is similar to Make but is implemented using the Java language, requires the Java platform, and is best suited to building Java projects....

 and Maven 1

Apache Maven

Maven is a build automation and software comprehension tool. While primarily used for Java programming, it can also be used to build and manage projects written in C#, Ruby, Scala, and other languages. Maven serves a similar purpose to the Apache Ant tool, but it is based on different concepts and...

 projects, setting up the classpath

Classpath (Java)

Classpath is a parameter—set either on the command-line, or through an environment variable—that tells the Java Virtual Machine or the compiler where to look for user-defined classes and packages.-Overview and architecture:...

 appropriately. Ant and Maven 1 have special hooks built in them to give Gump complete control of the classpath

Classpath (Java)

Classpath is a parameter—set either on the command-line, or through an environment variable—that tells the Java Virtual Machine or the compiler where to look for user-defined classes and packages.-Overview and architecture:...

s used to build and test the applications. This allows Gump to build the projects against the latest versions, even if the project's own build files have hard code

Hard code

Hard coding refers to the software development practice of embedding what may, perhaps only in retrospect, be regarded as input or configuration data directly into the source code of a program or other executable object, or fixed formatting of the data, instead of obtaining that data from external...

d dependencies against static libraries

Static library

In computer science, a static library or statically-linked library is a set of routines, external functions and variables which are resolved in a caller at compile-time and copied into a target application by a compiler, linker, or binder, producing an object file and a stand-alone executable...

 in their own CVS or subversion repository.

If a build on Gump is successful, then a report is placed on the site, and all projects that declare themselves dependencies are eligible to be built. If a project fails to build, error reports are published, an error email is sent, and all dependent projects are blocked from building.

History

Gump was created by Sam Ruby

Sam Ruby

Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to many of the Apache Software Foundation's open source software projects, and to the standardization of web feeds via his involvement with the Atom web feed standard and the feedvalidator.org web service.He currently...

, based on his experience in the Perl

Perl

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

 community. It was originally written in Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

Gump 3 is a complete rewrite in Python

Python (programming language)

Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...

. It is the live version.

Limitations

• There is no way to force developers to act on the you broke the build email, other than informal peer pressure.

• Until Maven
  Apache Maven
  Maven is a build automation and software comprehension tool. While primarily used for Java programming, it can also be used to build and manage projects written in C#, Ruby, Scala, and other languages. Maven serves a similar purpose to the Apache Ant tool, but it is based on different concepts and...
  
   support is added, there is a large swathe of Java projects that cannot be built. All projects downstream of these are only able to build on gump with static versions of the previous releases, removing one of the key features of the project: to build and test against nightly code.

• Diagnosing why something has failed can be hard, because developers on projects built by gump do not have access to the machine, only the nightly status reports.

• Because it is an open service for all open source projects, the project has invested less effort in making it easy to bring up a new gump installation. This makes private use harder. Of particular note, there is no automated way to provision a gump server with all the static JAR files that many projects depend upon.

• If a foundational project such as Ant
  Apache Ant
  Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. It is similar to Make but is implemented using the Java language, requires the Java platform, and is best suited to building Java projects....
  
  , Xerces
  Xerces
  Xerces is a collection of software libraries for parsing, validating, serializing and manipulating XML. The library implements a number of standard APIs for XML parsing, including DOM, SAX and SAX2. The implementation is available in Java, C++ and Perl programming languages.-External...
  
   or JUnit
  JUnit
  JUnit is a unit testing framework for the Java programming language. JUnit has been important in the development of test-driven development, and is one of a family of unit testing frameworks collectively known as xUnit that originated with SUnit....
  
  fails to build, then most of Gump is blocked until a fix is made. Depending on the nature of the failure, this can be a quick fix, or it could take longer.