[buckminster-dev] Re: Buckminster Build Process : Some Questions

["ken1 \(Kenneth Ölwing\)" <kenneth@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

> As you know, automated build conforms serveral actions / stages. I would 
> like to know the followings with respect to the buckminster :
>
>    1.Is it possilbe to create a site as as result of build process like in 
> Maven creates ?

I'm guessing that with 'site' you refer to a web site with code information 
etc...?

No, that kind of functionality is presently out of Buckminsters scope. 
Buckminster focuses on materialization and building.

As to 'possible' it still is of course. There's no reason Buckminster can't 
provide the core functionality of materialization/build and that 'actions' 
in components provides whatever type of support you'd want in that 
direction. Or, build Eclipse plugin(s) and talk directly to Buckminster 
API's.

>    2.How it handles the JUnit tests ? Is it possible to produce a test 
> report in HTML format ?

It handles JUnit tests just fine, like any other Eclipse plugin. It's 
important to remember that you *are* fully working inside Eclipse and thus 
can reap all the benefits of it, including JUnit support.

>    3.Is buckminster needs a central repository for dependencies ? or 
> dependencies can be picked up from any location or filesystem
>       paths ?

In principle, yes - Buckminster can pick up dependencies from any location. 
This is where the 'rmap' comes in; this is where you define the mapping 
between 'this component name can be found in various formats in these 
locations'. So, you might say that 'Buckminster needs a repository' - but 
that is a flexible concept.

The crucial point pertinent to your question is the generic use of 
'location'. We don't want to prescribe a certain format for a repository. 
Instead Buckminster contains a generic framework in which normal Eclipse 
plugins can be used to implement extension points that helps Buckminster 
understand a specific repository (they can, as you know be extremely 
different from one another). There's a bunch of repository providers 
already - CVS, Subversion, Perforce, any URL-based location (including Maven 
repositories).

You might also want to look into the discussion on 'cspec' - this is the 
internal format that Buckminster uses to 'understand' a component, but again 
Buckminster doesn't prescribe that you actually must have a concrete one. 
Instead, for example, the above mentioned Maven provider understands POM's 
and can on-the-fly translate them to cspec's.

>    4.After build process is finished, and I want to deploy these recently 
> produced artifacts to remote server (HTTP or FTP), is there
>      some standard functionality available as a part of Buckminster, which 
> can handle this ?

No, as we try to hold the core Buckminster functionality as general as 
possible, this is not in scope. The details of how to deploy, the type of 
the servers etc can be very different from user to user so this is best left 
to the individual user/team/company/whatever.

Actually, there are two different issues here: one is actual 'deployment' 
(i.e. making the application ready to run, which I presume is what you're 
after since you use 'deploy').

A similar issue is 'upload a component in a processed format to a repository 
for later use in materializations'. This is about the scenario where you 
wish to persist a binary form of a component you extracted in source from, 
say, a Subversion repository.

>    5.Is it possible to hook my own eclipse plugin into buckminster build 
> process ? Like in Maven, you can write a plugin and call that to
>       peform desired action ?

Yes, most definitively. Pick your choice - the first level is simply to make 
use of the (currently being implemented) Actors, essentially boiling down to 
standard scripting in, say, Ant or Make. Just declare an action and describe 
which Actor implementation that should be used for that action and when the 
dependencies require the action to be run, it will be executed.

The second level is to actually create your own Actor, say if you want to 
have much finer control of what should happen or need more information from 
Buckminster/Eclipse API - or just want to support some other form of 
scripting, perhaps another make utility. It's just an Eclipse extension 
point, so it's easy to hook in an implementation.

Or, in answer to your specific question - implement an Ant task or something 
else that can be called from the used Actor.

>    6.Is buckminster is able to pull artifacts from Maven 2 repositories ?
>

I'm unsure of where we stand with this at the moment, but I don't think we 
have implemented that support yet.

>     My aploligies if I have asked stupid questions!

No need to apologize for asking questions! (and relevant ones, too :-)

>
>     Thanks for you help!
>

You're welcome. As you can perhaps see, there are some relevance to 
comparing Buckminster/Eclipse and Maven (which I assume is what you're 
doing), but there is not a direct one-to-one mapping.

HTH,

ken1