Friday, March 20, 2009

Cross Platform Builds with Team Build

For some reason I seem to constantly find myself working with cross platform solutions (e.g. .NET, J2EE, C). Recently I've been assigned to figure out how we can compile custom Apache HTTPd modules without re-inventing our current build solution (which uses Team Build). I've created a diagram that describes the proposed solution.

The basic idea is we use Team Build for all the peripheral build tasks, outside of compile. Compile has to be done on platform specific machines (e.g. Linux 64). So to compile, we simply use Ant's SSH tasks to 1) transfer code to the platform machines, 2) compile via make and then 3) transfer binaries back to the Team Build server from the platform machines so the build can continue. We use Teamprise's Build Extensions to call Ant. In addition, in previous lives, we've used Teamprise for #1 and we'll probably look at doing the same in the near future. Here is the diagram.


2 comments:

franma said...

this topic very good , thank you for sharing

Milan said...

Not a good idea to build natively. Use CMAKE instead, to build on one machine. You can't build on low-ressources platforms natively (well, you can but it could take ages).