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Since the Maven team are having fun with Pebble to host their blogs, I thought that I'd have a play with Continuum, which is a continuous integration server in the same mould as CruiseControl et al.

I bought an Intel Mac mini earlier in the year and, since it doesn't do anything other than run iTunes and iChat, I've been meaning to setup a continuous integration server on it. I may be developing Pebble on my own, but I do sometimes get e-mails from people saying that the Subversion trunk is broken. Last week, I almost installed CruiseControl. On the one hand, it's something I'm familiar with. On the other, I know it can be a pain to setup sometimes. So, I figured I may as well give Continuum a try.

My first impression after reading the documentation was, "wow, this looks incredibly easy to install and configure". And I wasn't wrong. I grabbed version 1.0.3, unzipped it and ran the bin/plexus.sh script. A few seconds later, Continuum had started and I was able to navigate to the web console with my browser.

 < Continuum 1.0.3 started! >
 ----------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Pebble is built using a bog standard Ant build script, and this is supported by Continuum out of the box. From the web console, you add a new "Ant Project" and fill in a very short form that includes project name, version, SCM URL, SCM username and SCM password. I use Subversion for Pebble and the SCM URL is as follows.

scm:svn:https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pebble/trunk

After installing Ant and the SVN client (my Mac mini was essentially a completely clean OS X install), I told Continuum to start the build and off it went. Build successful!

The only additional things I've done, configuration wise, are to add an e-mail notifier so that I know when my build fails, setup the appropriate SMTP server and specify a different Ant target to be executed. It's actually taken me longer to write this blog entry than it has to get Continuum up and running.

If you're interested in learning more about Continuum, there's a great article on java.net entitled Continuous Integration with Continuum. Coupled with the documentation, this is all you should need to get up and running. I'm impressed. Go take a look.