[Anthill] Why I switched from CC to Anthill

[MARZIOU,GAEL (HP-France,ex1)]

Hi,

I have been using CruiseControl for more than one year and I have switched
to Anthill one month ago.
I thought it could be interesting for people to share why anthill better fit
our requirements, this message should not be considered as a flame against
CC.

The versions I have used are CC 1.21a and Anthill 1.4.91, I know that CC 2.0
has improved some points that I mention.
Also, I have been using both above Perforce so you may have different
experience if you use another repository.

* Anthill is able to handle multiple projects and their dependencies, CC is
not.
 
* Anthill is administrated from a web application which makes it easier to
be adopted by a team, responsibility is more easily shared.

* Anthill clearly separates the notions of build and publish.

* Anthill allows forced builds.

* I found Anthill easier to debug and anthill people are very responsive.

* I prefer Anthill scheduled builds versus CC continuous builds because
continuity here tends to flood developers mail boxes with build failure
messages (especially for JUnit execution). I think it's more convenient to
know that you build is scheduled nightly rather than for each change you
submit to repository and in case you want to run an integration after having
submitted a change, you can still force a build.

* CC build scheduler runs as a separate process which means a more complex
integration on Windows as it requires a service wrapper (e.g. JavaService)
to be run without a user logged in. Anthill uses a thread run from servlet
engine context, so it does not require to be wrapped as a Windows service
and it uses one single JVM. I can imagine that this point can be looked at a
disadvantage on a heavy loaded build machines. Ideally, both mechanisms are
useful and should be provided.

* CC uses XSL to present build log files, while it may look a good idea it
turned out to be a nightmare. Large XSL files are difficult to maintain and
CC forces a layout, so if you're not happy with the layout, you have to be
prepared to a difficult work. We found that developers prefer to get raw log
files than a nicer presentation that need to be maintained and may hide
important details in some cases.


Comments are welcome,

Gael