I've just stumbled upon a blog post by another happy Parabuild user:
"...I'm at a new job now, and we wanted to replicate a CI system. We tried a few open source projects, but they were all lacking in several major areas. Yesterday, I downloaded an evaluation for Parabuild. In one afternoon with this product I had accomplished:
- building all of our software products after every change
- scheduling nightly builds of our products off of the last known good change
- notification of failed builds
- history of builds
- change/build/failure correlation
Basically, in one afternoon I hit the 75% mark of functionality that it took us about 2 years to hit. Additionally, Parabuild has some very nice features for facilitating the extra 25%. It can talk to Perforce (right now we are using Subversion). It can talk to Bugzilla. This means that with a little work, we can generate pretty manangement-speak reports with builds, bugs and changes...
For $2500 this is a steal. To be able to validate all builds in one afternoon is really an extraordinary accomplishment.
That's from colinburns.cob entry Continuous Integration.
Then the weblog continues on describing how easy it was to set up remote builds with Parabuild. Apparently they are using multple virtual environments to run builds. Generally builds running in a VM are a bit slower but good hardware easiliy offsets possible slowdown:
"... It gets better. We upgraded to the top license. With this license you can run agents on remote machines and spread the build out so that it?s not all being done on one machine. We now have a machine dedicated to parabuild that just runs the web interface and scheduler. Two other machines (both virtual, BTW, running on a quad xeon system) build the code. One is building the client builds and one is building our service builds."
The blog also mentions that they had some concerns regarding managing large number of builds under Parabuild:
"...I?m starting to add a lot of projects and the display is getting a bit busy. Once we start branching, it?s going to get a little ugly. However, the update to this software supports RSS feeds, so it should be trivial to set up another web page for folks to look at specific projects of interest."
It looks like they used Parabuild 2.0 back then. Parabuild 3.0 addressed this concern by adding an ability to separate builds into easy to navigate display groups. This allows to control number of the builds simultaneously displayed on the build status pages.
There is even more cool stuff coming in Parabuild 3.1. My favorite is parallel builds. Parallel build give you an ability to run multiple builds synchronously on remote machines. This feature makes Parabuild ideal for multiplatform Continuous Integration and build acceleration.
Thanks for blogging about Parabuild! We are looking forward to hearing more about your experience!
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