• 15.1 Introducing continuous integration
• 15.2 Luntbuild
• 15.3 Moving to continuous integration
• 15.4 Summary

This book has now covered the entire process of building an application with Ant, from a simple library with a few unit tests, to a server-side application that's tested by running functional tests on a client or by running unit tests inside the application server. There's one more thing that Ant enables that can transform how your project works. Instead of running the builds by hand, why not delegate all the work to a machine? A machine that can rerun the builds and tests nightly, hourly, or whenever you feel the need? Running builds repeatedly is useful, but far too boring to do by hand. That's the kind of dull, repetitive work that machines are for, and where Ant can help.

This chapter is going to cover setting up a machine to run builds for you, not just to save developer time but also to transform your entire development process. It's a bit of a change from the previous chapters, as there are more screen shots than XML listings. This doesn't make it any less important. Indeed, the earlier a project sets up a continuous-integration system, the better.

Apache Gump

Imagine if someone ran a big server that built all the Java open source projects every night? And sent emails if they broke? That would be useful, wouldn't it. Here is a PDF document that introduces Apache Gump, and shows how any open source project can get on its nightly build.

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