Mike is Maven Ready!

We’re really pleased to be able to announce that Mike now supports the building of projects that are built by the Maven 2 build tool.  It has been clear from the beta that Maven was a “must have” feature for our users, and so we’ve made this our development priority for the past few weeks.

You can now point Mike at your Maven pom file, specify the phases and build parameters, and Mike will do the rest. You can download the build output and optionally ask Mike to generate you a Maven site – which is viewable via the build results page.

Surefire report for commons beanutils

Maven 2 does provide a number of challenges for a hosted continuous integration provider. Our users share build resource and we need to ensure that the build environments are secure. This means we have taken a pragmatic approach and have had to restrict some of the features that are available in Maven. We’ve also started with a whitelist of common Maven release and snapshot repositories for downloading artefacts, at the moment we don’t support the deployment of artefacts to remote repositories. You can read more on this in our faq.

We can also only internally test this new feature using finite number of representative projects and we want to get more Maven projects as part of our beta. We’re more than happy to work with our users to get their projects building on the platform. Some projects might talk to a repo that we don’t currently access or use a Maven feature we don’t currently support and we’ll work through these issues with our beta community. It’s important we get a platform that meets the needs of our users but is also reliable and secure and active participation on our beta will ensure we strike the right balance.

Also included in the release is a new module, the Mike Account Manager. The Account Manager enables users to invite other team members to join them on Mike. Users can also amend their user name, and change their email address and password. You can read more about the Account Manager here.

We’ve rolled both the Maven 2 aupport and Account Manager functionality into our beta programme, and it was exciting for us to see the first Maven builds added by our beta users late last week. We have got some limited space on the beta, if anyone is interested they can sign up here.

Adding an Eclipse project to Mike

Quick video demonstrating how easy it is to add a project to Mike. This demo takes you through the build job wizard and then runs the build. The project is a Spring based Java web application. Mike generates a build from the Eclipse meta-data. We have an Eclipse plug-in which can generate a Mike compatible project and we’ll be blogging about that very soon.

The build wizard steps are real-time, the only bit I’ve edited is the build duration (which took 56 seconds)!

Mike now also has a YouTube channel where we will post demos and how to guides.

Enjoy!

Beta launch week

It’s been an exciting week at Mike HQ this week. Announcements for the Beta have gone out on the ServerSide and the JavaLobby. We’ve also had a few enquiries and, of course, sign-ups! People are now building their projects on our platform! It’s a very exciting time for us. We hope our beta users enjoy using the platform and we’re really looking forward to the feedback.

Maven2 support is a feature a number of people have asked us about.  It is something we are working on and we’ll keep you posted as to when we will add it to the Beta programme. It’s a key feature for the platform.

We’ve also started work on the Mike registration and account management application, agreeing the screen-flows, designs and functionality. This should give users a seamless registration process and the ability to add and remove users from their Mike account. We’ve also been extending the coverage of our Selenium tests for Mike and adding them to our nightly build cycle.

Have a good weekend!

Beta launched!

I’m very happy to announce that the we are ready to launch the MikeCI private beta. We’re doing a limited private beta for a number of reasons. Firstly, we want feedback on the platform. This is a great chance for people to get on board early and try our service out and let us know what they like or don’t like. We hopefully get great feedback and you get a free CI Server!

We’re also keen to ensure we can handle the stresses and strains of lots of people running build jobs. Doing this under a private beta allows us to add users in a controlled manner and double check everything is working as it should be before we go live. Finally the beta allows us to bed down our support and admin processes before a full launch. We’re not like Google – this beta period is limited to the end of November, so please get in touch soon if you want to sign up.

Announcements will be going out this week on various sites. Please say hello@mikeci.com if you want to take part.

Chris