Google is promoting the use of the Jenkins continuous integration server with its Google AppEngine (GAE) platform.
Continuous integration of changes to software code becomes more critical as dev teams get bigger and more dispersed. Jenkins is an open-source tool that pulls in all those changes, centralizes them, and goes through changes continuously to verify code quality. The goal is to make both the development and quality assurance (QA) of code faster and more efficient — with fewer round trips.
Towards that end, Google is pointing GAE developers to Cloudbee’s Jenkins implementation. (Cloudbees offers a Java-specific Platform as a Service (PaaS).)
What tools like Jenkins do is replace chaos, said Ryan Campbell, software developer at Cloudbees. “Any time someone on the team changes something, Jenkins will check it out, test it and then email the developers if they’ve broken anything. Now [with] the App Engine integration, if the tests look good it will automatically deploy the code in GAE — probably in a test environment for your QA team to look at.”
According to the Google App Engine blog:
Jenkins will monitor your projects’ source code for any changes, run the necessary builds and tests, and notify your team of any problems – or automatically deploy the application to Google App Engine if everything looks good. This process helps to prevent the deployment of broken code, and gives everyone a central record of what changes went into each deployment.
Developers can sign up at appengine.cloudbees.com using their GAE account and can continue using whatever source code service — GitHub, Cloudbees’ own Git and SVN servers as needed, according to the blog.
Jenkins competes with Hudson in open-source continuous integration. Other CI competitors include Atlassian’s Bamboo and JetBrains’ TeamCity.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Leszek Glasner
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