Question

I am setting up the build system for a team that produces APIs used on several platforms and architectures. There has been a lot of work already spent on setting up Ant to build all of the Java code, so I would prefer to stick with Ant if possible.

Where I am stumped is how to build the C++ software. Here are the platforms and languages I need to support:

• Java – Linux – 32bit & 64bit: Ant
• Java – Windows – 32bit & 64bit: Ant
• C++ – Linux – 32bit & 64bit: Ant w/CppTasks (question #1)
• C++ – Windows – 32bit: (question #2)

Note: C++ on Windows is MS Visual Studio C++ projects.

I think the answer to question #1 is CppTasks because that seems to be the standard way to build C++ from Ant.

For question #2, I could also use CppTasks, but the developers will be compiling in Visual Studio, so it seems beneficial to use their Visual Studio project for building, which means calling MSBuild from Ant.

Has anyone tried this before and has a good solution for building Java & C++ on both Linux and Windows?

Answer 1

Do you use a Continuous Build System like Jenkins?

With Jenkins, your builds can be automatically triggered by check in/commit, time of day, and/or on command. The great thing about Jenkins is that you can have it automatically build all of the various versions of your software.

For example, you’ll probably need to run make on Linux C++ but use msbuild on Windows systems, and you’ll need to trigger a build on a Linux machine and one for a Windows machine. Jenkins can be setup to do this automatically. When a commit happens, all your various builds on all of your systems can be triggered at once. Then, you can store the builds you need on Jenkins and have your users actually pull the type they need off the project they need.

There are so many ways this could be setup, but the easiest is to simply create four separate jobs (One for Java 32bit, Java 64bit, C++ Linux, and C++ Microsoft). You don’t necessarily need a separate Microsoft Java build (at least in theory), but there’s nothing stopping you.

You can have a single Jenkins server run “slave” jobs on other build systems, so you could have Jenkins live on the 64Bit Linux system, but use a 32bit Linux system as a slave to do the 32bit build, and call a Windows slave to do the Visual Basic build. That way, all of your jobs are located in a central place, but you can use the environments you want.

If you’ve never used a Continuous Build system, download Jenkins and play around with it. It’s free and open source, and very, very easy to use. You can run it on any machine that has a JDK or JRE 1.6. If you download the Windows version, it even comes with the JRE already built in.

Your best bet is to use a continuous build system and allow it to handle the mess. By the way, there’s also Bamboo, CruiseControl, and Hudson (which was split from Jenkins a few months ago)