10. January 2012
Let’s imagine the following situation. You’re working on an application for a customer. Despite a firm deadline and a roadmap given to your customer, he’d like to check the progress regularly, let’s say weekly or even daily, and actually give you feedback.
So to make everybody happy, you start releasing the application weekly. However, releasing is generally a hard-core process, even for the most automated processes, and requires human actions. As the release date approaches, stress increases. The tension reaches its climax one hour before the deadline when the release process fails, or worse, when the deployment fails. We’ve all been in situations like that, right?
This all-too-common nightmare can be largely avoided. This blog post presents a way to deal with the above situation using Jenkins, Nexus and SSH. The application is deployed continuously and without human intervention on a test environment, which can be checked and tested by the customer. Jenkins, a continuous integration server, is used as the orchestrator of the whole continuous delivery process.
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4 Comments | 
All, Innovation | Tagged: Berlin, Continuous, Delivery, Deutschland, Germany, hudson, integration, javaEE, jenkins, Maven, nexus, SSH, Tomcat | 
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Posted by Clement Escoffier
1. November 2011
Our last blog post introduced how Puppet can be used to achieve Infrastructure-As-Code, and how to deploy Play applications following this practice. However, we didn’t address how the applications are actually copied to the host.
Apache Maven is a widely used build tool adopted by more and more companies to support their build process from compilation to deployment. Deploying, in the Maven world, means uploading the artifact to a Maven repository. Such Maven repositories are managed using Sonatype Nexus or JFrog Artifactory. However, this sort of deployment does not address the real provisioning of the application, i.e the deployment on the production servers.
This blog post presents a Puppet module to download Maven artifacts from a Nexus repository. This module closes the gap between the development team deploying their artifacts to a Maven repository, and the administration team responsible for installing and configuring the application.
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5 Comments | All, Innovation, JBOSS AID, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: artifacts, Berlin, continuous delivery, deployment, Deutschland, Germany, infrastructure as code, Maven, nexus, puppet, repository | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
21. February 2011
Maven is a great build tool that has already proven its benefits. But sometimes, you need an extension for a custom task or need. Luckily, Maven is extensible and allows you to write plugins.
Now, when implementing a Maven plugin, you generally want to test it as well. If possible, we want do do that automatically. Those tests then run on your continuous integration server and you’re notified when, unfortunately, you (or someone else) broke something. Automatic Maven Plugin tests can be done with different approaches. This post focuses on a strategy suitable for integration tests.
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Leave a Comment » | All, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: it, Maven, mojo, plugins, tdd, test, verifier | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
11. February 2011
Installing an automatic build process for your projects is very common today and best practice. In the java world Maven is a very popular build tool and has proven its matureness over the years. In this blog post we will show you the benefits of a Maven build and how we can utilize them for javascript projects. Finally we present two maven archetypes for creating ready to go fully mavenized javascript projects for your first steps.
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9 Comments | All, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: archetype, CI, html5, jasmine, javascript, jquery, Maven, plugin, test | Permalink
Posted by Daniel Bremer-Tonn
28. January 2011
Android applications can grow very quickly. As they are composed of components (Activities, Services and Content Providers), it should be easy to extend an existing application to create new applications by just reusing already developed components. Recently, the akquinet Mobile Team had to develop several versions of the same application with a different set of features. This might sound easy, but Android does not really support such kind of modular development. Indeed, we faced several issues coming from the Android development model.
This blog post explains the encountered issues and how we fixed them by using rindirect. This tool allows, inside an Android application, to integrate components defined in other Android applications. This reuse pattern is close to impossible to achieve without rindirect or implies major limitations. Rindirect is developed by akquinet and is now available as open-source. This tools is well suited for Maven-based development, and so, works pretty well alongside the maven-android plugin.
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2 Comments | All, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: activity, android, component, intent, Maven, maven-rindirect-plugin, mobile, plugin, reuse, rindirect, service | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
14. January 2011
Despite of not being in widespread use in the Android world, Apache Maven is a great tool to develop Android applications. Maven has a lot of advantages relevant for Android application development:
- It can be integrated on a continuous integration server, allowing continuous testing and nightly-build delivery
- It provides a strict release process avoiding errors and inconsistencies. The resulting APK are ‘marketplace-ready’
- It also provides a common way to build and package the applications
- It supports modular-development allowing the integration of classes and resources from others projects
This post explores how to quickly start developing Android applications using Maven. It presents three archetypes allowing getting a running application in less than 2 minutes!
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13 Comments | All, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: activity, android, archetype, Maven, mobile, obfuscation, proguard, release | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
14. January 2011
Developing sophisticated Android applications is challenging. Despite tools provided with the SDK and the recommended ADT Eclipse Plugin, maintaining and developing an Android application is time-consuming.
This blog post introduces a series on the rationalization of Android application development. It aims to explain how the akquinet mobile team have changed the way to create Android applications to improve the efficiency and quality of the developed applications. This series covers several topics, from the utilization of Apache Maven, the integration with a continuous integration server to the customization of the logging framework.
akquinet has participated in the improvement of all the tools used and presented in this series and has also released several internally developed components as open-source projects.
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Leave a Comment » | All, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: ADT, agile, android, androlog, CI, efficiency, hudson, Maven, mobile, mobility, quality, test, Testing | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
7. June 2010
The last post of this series has introduced a couple of useful options to manage built modules in a multi-module project. This post focuses on failure. Maven proposes three different way to manage failures in reactor builds: fail-fast (default), fail-at-end and fail-never which will be described in this post.
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1 Comment | All, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: CLI, failure, Maven, test | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
1. June 2010
How do you test your JSF application? Using JSFUnit allows you to perform integration test of your JSF application. The tests are run inside the container. JSFUnit tests can access the internal state of your application. The JSFUnit documentation describes how JSFUnit can be integrated into a Maven build environment. It leverages the maven-cargo-plugin and the maven-surefire-plugin to deploy the tests to an application server and execute them using JUnit.
However this is only explained for a plain Web archive (.war). It remains unclear how a JSF application can be tested which is packaged within an Enterprise archive (.ear). Continue to read if you are interested to see how we used JSFUnit to test our EAR based JSF application and how we integrated it in our Maven build environment.
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6 Comments | All, JBOSS AID | Tagged: cargo, ear, jsf, jsfunit, Maven, SEAM | Permalink
Posted by Alphonse Bendt
26. May 2010
The last post of this series introduced you to a couple of useful options to manage dependencies in maven. In this post, we’ll focus on multi-module builds — a.k.a., reactor builds. Starting with version 2.1, Maven provides a couple of very interesting options allowing to avoid re-building all modules after a small change. This can save a lot of waiting for the build to complete and is what this post is all about.
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1 Comment | All, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: Maven | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
