We've been using AntHill to do continuous builds. It has served us well, but we're now moving away from it and towards CruiseControl.

There are a few main reasons for this. First and foremost, AntHill runs inside of Tomcat. This is billed as a feature, but for us, it was a big problem. There are two layers of Java containers between your OS and your build. Trying to get environment variables (like "DISPLAY=localhost:99.0") passed from an init script, to Tomcat, to AntHill, to ANT, was just becoming too burdensome.

We also experienced some serious classpath pollution. Some things just acted differently between ANT builds on our development boxes and ANT builds on the build box. That's unacceptable, but we found that with AntHill it was impossible to eliminate the differences. Finally, through some jar file unpacking and decompilation, we found that our builds were picking up classes from AntHill's ow n jars.

The ability to fix these things exists, but only in AntHill Pro. I downloaded CruiseControl today and spent an hour going through the quick start and FAQ. At the end of it, I had our build process replicated on CruiseControl.

I did run into a problem... the checkstyle task that we have been running as part of our build all along started failing. I assumed that it was something wrong with the build box, or with my project configuration for CruiseControl. After half an hour or so, I ran the same build on a dev box, but from the command line. It failed there, too. It turns out that checkstyle includes a version of the Jakarta commons-collections classes that is not compatible with the Jakarta digester version that we've added to our code base.

This problem existed all along. Running the build under CruiseControl was enough like running it from the command line that it uncovered a problem which had been present for over two weeks. For some reason, running under AntHill never revealed this problem.

Bottom line is, a CI server needs to be as close to running a command-line build as possible. If I have to spend time figuring out what environmental conditions the CI tool is imposing on my build, then it is defeating the purpose.

Now, I just have to figure out why in the hell checkstyle's classpath is leaking into the classpath of the code it is checking.

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