CruiseControl.NET 1.4.2 Released

CruiseControl.Net 1.4.2 released

The full release notes are on the CruiseControl.Net wiki.

1.4.2 was a bug fix release to correct problems introduced in 1.4.1. The 1.4.1 release had over a hundred fixes and enhancements.

Work continues, with the introduction of user-based permissions around forcing and aborting builds expected for the next release.

PicoContainer 2.6 + PicoContainer-Web 2.1 released

PicoContainer 2.6

From the relevant news page

New (since 2.5.1):

• CompositeLifecycleStrategy supports a mix of LifecycleStrategies in one container tree
• Method Injection changed to also allow a specific reflection method to be implicated
• Reinjection added to allow components to be injected into a second time (reflection method injection only)

Changes (versus 2.5.1):

• Permissions fix for AdaptingInjection

PicoContainer Web 2.1

From the relevant news page

New (since 2.0.1):

• Above and beyond the capability of the web-technology in question (Struts/Webwork etc), actions can now require one or more of HttpServletRequest, HttpServletResponse and HttpSession to be injected.

ThoughWorkers involved: Paul Hammant. PicoContainer is worked on my many non-ThoughtWorkers too though!

London Geek Night - Mocking 28th May 2008

On Thursday May 28th 2008 there will be a Mocking focussed Geek Night at the ThoughtWorks London office, covering various Open Source Java mocking projects:

Mocking can make code more reliable, more comprehensible and allow you to spot problems in design long before your code is deployed. Speakers will include Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce, developers of JMock and Felix Leipold of ThoughtWorks.

Time permitting there will also be a mocking dojo to allow you to get

See:

http://londongeeknights.wetpaint.com
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/498162/

PicoContainer 2.2 released

PicoContainer 2.2 has been released with a slew of new features and a bug fix.

The news page from the project's site details the changes.

For the uninitiated it is an container for components that follow the Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection  principles. When it first started as a project in 2003, it was the only container that did the auto wiring of Constructor Injection. There are plenty of choices in this field these days, but PicoContainer is still used inside Intellij IDEA and JIRA.  

Also using PicoContainer: Waffle is a Rails "convention over configuration" inspired web framework that some suggest is a deal more pleasant to develop with than Struts/WebWork.

Buildix 2.1 Released

I'm happy to announce that Buildix 2.1 is now available from buildix.thoughtworks.com

One of the major highlights of this release is that it now integrates with Mingle 2.0 and uses the wonderful new API they provide to make it a faster and more stable experience!

More info available at here.

Chris

Linux.com article: Open source testing tools target varied tasks

On Linux.com there is an article on open source testing tools. It is a thorough run down of the field. Of note from a ThoughtWorks point of view is our part in the field's history. Mark Aberdour (from OST) is quoted in the article:

"In functional testing there are a number of really great tools (Selenium, Abbot, Jameleon, jWebUnit, Marathon, Sahi, soapui, and Watin/Watir to name a few) with strong feature sets"

Those in bold were either started by ThoughtWorkers or one of the lead developers was a ThoughtWorker. It makes us proud!

Selenium User Meetup videos

Meeting up at Google for the user evening was great fun.  It was short notice, but we managed to fill the 100 slots on the attendee list, and get two pieces where video recorded, while still leaving time for mingling. 

The first video was the lightening talks by the developers and some friends. Its up on YouTube.  Its 92 minutes long.  Dan Fabulich (ex of Bea, now Redfin) if he is not a star already, should be as his segment How not to run a Successful open source project is a very entertaining few minutes. Fast forward to 51 mins to see Fabulich by name, Fabulous by nature.

ThoughtWorks was represented by me (Paul Hammant) and Philippe Hanrigou.  My piece was on release roadmap (19 mins, 20 secs in), Philippe's was on Selenium-Grid (23 mins in). His featured a very impressive movie showing Selenium-Grid running dozens of windows on Philippe's MacBook.  Jennifer Bevan of Google also talked of their farm and use of Selenium for QA of some of the web applications, and the problems/successes of scaling (28 mins, 40 secs in).  The other segments were great too. Thanks to all the friends of ThoughtWorks who did a segment, and have helped make Selenium the success it is.

The second piece was a Q&A session (which we kinda had to cut short, because the lightening talks speakers were not following the suggested 5 minute limit :).  That was just the selenium developers (minus Nelson Sproul of Bea who could not make it).  See the video (18 mins)

We were at Google for two days in all. On Sunday 24th the developers met up and talked/coded through the day. On the Monday it was a regular work day for Google, so we were able to see the campus a bit more busy than the Sunday.  Planning the release of 1.0, and the assimilation of Simon Stewart's WebDriver into a 2.0 code-line was key.  Selenium users will be pleased to know that we talked about the two pending Flash/Flex enablers for Selenium that might get merged in shortly.  We sadly ran out of time, and could not speak about or merge in an Erlang driver for Selenium (coded in a matter of days by Brian O'Rourke before the meetup).