a little madness

Having just made the third milestone build of the Pulse 2.1 Early Access Program, it occurred to me that it’s about time we started telling people about it! We’re baking two major new features into 2.1:

• Project Dependency Support: until now Pulse has had only limited support for dependencies, and we’ve recommended the use of tools like Apach Ivy for the delivery of artifacts between dependent builds. In Pulse 2.1, however, we’ve embedded Ivy in Pulse — both an artifact repository and the configuration of dependencies. Now you can simply declare what projects you depend on and Pulse will deliver artifacts between your builds. We’re also adding support for smart dependency triggering.
• Flexible Projects Without the XML: the build engine of Pulse has always been flexible, allowing you to define multiple build recipes each with an arbitrary number of commands, captured outputs and post-processing. However, to access the full flexibility you needed to write an XML Pulse file by hand. Well, no longer. In Pulse 2.1, the full flexibility of the engine is configurable via the Pulse web UI! These changes also allow support for new build tools to be plugged in more easily.

We’ve still got plenty of work to do, such as figuring out the trickier questions around dependencies and improving the usability of the new features. On top of this we also plan plenty of minor improvements based on feedback from our users. If you want to be part of the feedback process, just head over to the EAP page, download a build and tell us what you think!

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 5:16 am and is filed under Build, Continuous Integration, Technology, Zutubi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.