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SANTA CLARA, Calif. – OpenMake Software, which makes build management tools for developers, is launching a version of its Meister build solution to support agile development.
Tracy Ragan, co-founder and chief operations officer of OpenMake, said Meister 7.2 enhances the continuous integration process for Eclipse developers by allowing for what she refers to as “build mashups.”
OpenMake announced the new features of Meister 7.2 at the EclipseCon conference here March 17.
Ragan said Meister 7.2, which will ship in the second quarter of 2008, enables developers to mash up their Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment) build with a continuous integration build automatically running outside of the Eclipse IDE. This prevents builds from breaking when a developer makes changes to the source code that could impact the builds-such as refactoring, deleting or adding libraries and classes, and changing compile options, Ragan said.
Continuous integration is a concept out of the Extreme Programming style of agile software development aimed at speeding the delivery of software by decreasing integration times. As part of continuous integration, members of a development team integrate their work frequently-leading to multiple integrations per day, and each integration is verified by an automated build, said Martin Fowler, chief scientist at ThoughtWorks and an early proponent of the concept.
“In Meister 7.2 we’re introducing the concept of Build Mashups,” Ragan said. “I don’t think you need a Web service to do a mashup, but that’s exactly what we’re doing. We take data from two different sources and mash it up together to make a new piece of functionality.”
Meister 7.2 provides similar enhancements for Microsoft’s development suite supporting cross-platform and cross-language builds between Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio, Ragan said. Supporting cross-language environments simplifies the complexities of enterprise builds where applications written in both Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio share data and dependencies and must be built together as a complete application, she said.