Late working

Work keeps getting in the way
We started the final sprint before pilot last week. The team reviewed the estimates, and found there was an excess of work over available hours - no surprises there.
So at least there's been a sensible solution. A lot of people on the team have young kids (including me), so rather than work weekends and panic in the last week, as a team we voted to stay late Tues and Thurs for the remainder of the sprint. Not great, but better than the alternatives. And at least there's pizza.

But it does mean there's almost no time to work on my own project.

Open Source Licences

I'm going to build this whole app by stitching together open source apps and plug-ins, but as this is mine, I better start making sure all licenses are correct. I did get a link to this site today, which I'll keep as a handy useful reference.

Hudson

Continuous Integration needed
The advantages of a CI server are well documented elsewhere, and life is easier with them, so I decided to use Hudson. Again, I haven't used this one before, so was keen to see what it was like.

Hudson
The Hudson documentation seems good at first pass, so installation onto the Tomcat service on the server box should be straightforward.
First problem was the installation of the UnxUtils utilities required : no reference was made on how to install these. A quick Google search found these instructions. Problem solved.

The best reference I found to set up Hudson on Windows was this one.




As at the end of tonight, there are still problems getting a build to work. I've made two mistakes :
1. Set the maven home to be the <maven>/bin directory, instead of <maven>

2. Now getting permgen errors running the build - sigh.

Archiva revisited

Why revisit ?

Last time around I set up Archiva as a stand alone service, on port 8081. This proved easy enough, and I had my first couple of builds, so I started to think about a continuous integration service.
I've set up Cruise Control in a previous job, and had been happy with it. Having looked around, this time round I'm going to use Hudson, and see if it's as easy to use as the documentation claims.

Web server needed
Having looked at Hudson, it can run stand alone, or be deployed to a server. For ease of admin, I decided to put both Archiva and Hudson on the same Tomcat server, and run it as a service. I've been using Tomcat 5.0.x for years, none of the companies I've worked for have felt the need to move past it, so I may as well jump in and see what Tomcat 7 is like.
First impressions : bit disappointing really. The familiarity is good, but there isn't much new for the user there. Compared to the information available through Glassfish or Websphere consoles, it's poor. There are workarounds, I'll see if lambda probe works with T7.

Tomcat 7 problems
Downloading and installing Tomcat 7 as a service was no problem, and I got Archiva installed as a web app - easy enough when following the site documentation

One thing to remember when running Archiva on Tomcat as a service : set the parameters in the Tomcat 7 properties dialog box:
-Dappserver.base=D:\Tomcat 7.0
-Dappserver.home=D:\Tomcat 7.0

But
When I came back a couple of days later, I found the client couldn't connect to the server, the dreaded "Server is taking too long to respond" message came back.
I dread these kid of sys admin problems, no matter how trivial. Anyway, I could ping the Tomcat box, on the right port, but could not get a browser request to work. I uninstalled Tomcat 7. As a comparison I downloaded Tomcat 6, and ran it on a different port : this time no problems. But then to double check, I re installed Tomcat 7, but this time, no issues connecting to the manager app from the client machine.
So at the end of a night's work, I'm not really any further forward than I was. I now have Archiva running on a Tomcat 7 service. I need to update my Maven settings to point to the new port, and run a Maven build.