IBM Rational ClearCase, Ant, and CruiseControl: The Java Developers Guide to Accelerating and Automating the Build Process

As a tool, CruiseControl fulfills a simple need: executing your builds and subsequently notifying you of their success or failure. How much you use CruiseControl and how often you build depends on your personal preferences. However, once you have set up an automatic build scheduling environment, you should feel confident that you can support a process in which integration and builds occur more frequently. The integration to ClearCase is straightforward enough. All you really need to do is specify the integration branch to monitor (a facility that works with both Base ClearCase and UCM) and whether any files in a snapshot view should be updated. In terms of what is actually executed, again it is basically a specific target from the project's Ant build script, which you should now be familiar with from Chapters 4 and 5.

This chapter concentrated on describing a basic but working CruiseControl setup without going into too much detail. The next chapter looks in more detail at some best practices for configuring CruiseControlin particular, the installation and use of the Build Results web. I'll also go into more depth about CruiseControl's capabilities for scheduling, publishing, and integrating with ClearCase.