Apache Gump is an open source Continuous Integration system, which aims to build and test all the open source Java projects, every night. Its aim is to make sure that all the projects are compatible, at both the API level and in terms of functionality matching specifications. It is hosted at [[1]], and runs every night on the official Sun JVM. Continuous integration is a software engineering term describing a process that completely rebuilds and tests an application frequently. ...

To join Gump, a project must provide two XML files. One describes how to access the live CVS or Subversion repository; the other what to build from the repository, and the artifacts produced. Each project can be dependent upon other projects; these dependencies are declared so that Gump knows the correct order to build things. Gump can build shell script, Ant and Maven 1 projects, setting up the classpath appropriately. Ant and Maven 1 have special hooks built in them to give Gump complete control of the classpaths used to build and test the applications. This allows Gump to build the projects against the latest versions, even if the project's own build files have hard coded dependencies against static libraries in their own CVS or subversion repository. Apache Ant is a software tool for automating software build processes. ... For other uses of the word Maven see: Maven (disambiguation) Maven is a software tool for Java programming language project management and automated software build. ...

If a build on Gump is successful, then a report is placed on the site, and all projects that declare themselves dependencies are eligible to be built. If a project fails to build, error reports are published, an error email is sent, and all dependent projects are blocked from building.

History

Gump was created by Sam Ruby, based on his experience in the Perl community. It was originally written in Java Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who is also active in the open source and internet and web standardization world. ... Perl is a dynamic programming language created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. ... Java is an object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. ...

Gump 2.0 is a complete rewrite in Python. It is the live version. Python is a programming language created by Guido van Rossum in 1990. ...

Limitations

• There is no way to force developers to act on the you broke the build email, other than informal peer pressure.

• Until Maven support is added, there is a large swathe of Java projects that cannot be built. All projects downstream of these are only able to build on gump with static versions of the previous releases, removing one of the key features of the project: to build and test against nightly code.

• Diagnosing why something has failed can be hard, because developers on projects built by gump do not have access to the machine, only the nightly status reports.

• Because it is an open service for all open source projects, the project has invested less effort in making it easy to bring up a new gump installation. This makes private use harder. Of particular note, there is no automated way to provision a gump server with all the static JAR files that many projects depend upon.

• If a foundational project such as Ant, Xerces or JUnit fails to build, then most of Gump is blocked until a fix is made. Depending on the nature of the failure, this can be a quick fix, or it could take longer. [[2]].