What is Brockman?
Brockman is a light, open source information radiator for monitoring Ant builds. It is useful for Agile software teams that practice Continuous Integration.
What does Brockman do?
Brockman displays a webpage with the status of your software project's ANT build. It tells you when the last build was OK, the current build is running and if the build failed.
Why would I use Brockman?
You would use Brockman to radiate the status of your software project's build to the entire team. The idea is that anyone in the software development workspace can tell the status
What technologies does Brockman use?
Brockman consists of:
- An Ant listener written in Java that outputs that status of your build, in xml
- A Freemarker template that specifies the format of the outputted xml file
- An AJAX front end that renders the xml file
Who developed Brockman
Brockman evolved from an earlier build monitor developed at 3Q Solutions. The contributors are listed here
How does Brockman work with Continuous Integration Servers?
A Continuous Integration tool such as CruiseControl monitors your source code repository on a regular basis (say every 30 minutes) and automatically launches your build process (Ant, Maven, etc.). By configuring CruiseControl to call the monitorbuild script, Brockman can report on the status of this build.
So far, Brockman works very well with CruiseControl (See the tutorial). We have yet to try it with other Continuous Integration Servers such as AntHill or DamageControl.
Why Brockman?
Build monitors are bit like a 24 hour news channel. They radiate information to developers, customers, managers and tea ladies on the current state of the software project. Therefore Brockman gets its name from this famous news personality known for telling it like it is.