Build and Continuous Integration Tools

We�ve examined at length the benefits of automating your build process, and as you would expect, there are many off-the-shelf tools that will help you to do so.


Build Tools
The granddaddy of build tools is the venerable make. Things have moved on, however, and several much better choices are now available.

GNU Make: http://www.gnu.org/software/make/
Although based upon make, GNU Make supports a number of significant extensions allowing much more sophisticated control over the build process than has traditionally been available.

Autoconf: http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/
Autoconf is particularly appropriate for open source software that needs to support building in a wide range of different environments. It allows the build system to automatically determine what facilities are available on the host system and behave accordingly.

Jam: http://www.perforce.com/jam/jam.html
Jam is an alternative to make that typically requires much less configuration to build a given project.

Boost.Build: http://www.boost.org/doc/tools/build/
Built on top of Jam, Boost.Build provides a standard build system particularly appropriate to building C++ software.

SCons: http://www.scons.org/
This is a make replacement integrating autoconf-like functionality.

Ant: http://ant.apache.org/
Ant is a make replacement that has become the de facto standard build tool within the Java world.

Maven: http://maven.apache.org/
Maven is a software project management tool that does much more than simply manage the build process, bringing package management, deployment, and other facilities to the Java world and rapidly gaining mind share from Ant.

Capistrano: http://www.capify.org/
Not a build tool per se, Capistrano manages the task of deploying software on a number of different servers. Although particularly associated with Ruby on Rails, it can be used to deploy products created with any technology.


Continuous Integration Tools
Many of the proprietary systems we�ve already discussed (such as Microsoft�s Visual Studio Team System) come with their own continuous integration solutions. In addition, there are a number of open source systems available:

CruiseControl: http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/
This is probably the best known open source continuous integration system. As well as the main Java implementation, there are also .NET and Ruby on Rails variants.

Hudson: http://hudson.dev.java.net/
This is an open source J2EE continuous integration server.

Source of Information :  Paul Butcher - Debug it Find repair and prevent bugs