Everyone that writes code faces similar problems. On top of creatively addressing the problems we’re given, every project has to be stored, assembled, and eventually deployed in some way. Along the way we start with a small code base that grows in complexity and eventually we end up with an application that potentially has dependencies spanning multiple technologies. Before long we’ve created lots of instructions on how to piece together and deploy the application, just to keep ourselves organized.  We do all of this with the hope that the eventual move of the code base to another machine won’t be too much of a hassle. Sound familiar?

The problem of course has to do with consolidating the process of assembling our projects and their dependencies into what is called a build. If we can boil this process down to a single script, then producing artifacts to deploy to our development, testing, or even production environments become almost trivial.  But how do we to a point where we can create these artifacts to even think about moving forward?

The goal of this shootout will be to present a few different solutions for doing just this. All of our presenters have been given a project to show us how each of the build tools they are championing can be used.  The project is a Flex application with a ColdFusion webservice as the backend — with test cases written for both.   It is the goal of each presenter to show the following in a script for their build tool of choice:

  1. Execute and store all of the output from the FlexUnit and CFUnit unit tests in the project
  2. Compile the Flex portion of the application into a swf
  3. Bundle the swf and all of the ColdFusion files into some type of archive file (e.g. – zip, war, tar/gz, etc.)

Because the scope of this presentation is limited to building the project, we will not go into too much detail about how the build artifacts cab be used for deployment.  We will however have a discussion panel composed of our presenters after the presentations who take be available to answer any questions you may have.

This promises to be an exciting presentation, so tell your colleagues.  We’ll see you all at the October 2nd meeting!