Eyefodder

About a year ago, I posted a six part series explaining how to set up a continuous integration process for your Flex projects. Since then I have been refining the process when I have had a spare moment. One of the hassles I found when trying to setup CI on a new machine was getting the python based flash log parser working. I decided to remove the python dependency altogether and create a jar that parses the flash logs.

So, grab the jar from here and unzip it to your externals/lib directory. Then add the following properties to your build:

<property name="logParser" value="${lib}/FlashLogParser.jar"/>

<property name="flashStatus.location" value="${logs}/status.txt"/>

<property name="flashOutput.location" value="${logs}/TEST-testOutput.xml"/>

<target name="parseFlashLog" description="parses flash log" depends="clean" >

  <java jar="${logParser}" failonerror="true" fork="true">

  	<arg line="'${flashlog.location}'"/>

  	<arg line="'${flashStatus.location}'"/>

  	<arg line="'${flashOutput.location}'"/>

  </java>

</target>

Posted by Paul BH at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags

So, I thought I was doing pretty well, getting svn working on the mac, installing cruisecontrol, even getting SCPlugin working with unsigned certificates. Then I tried to run my ant build, and ended up having all sorts of problems getting my mac debug player to run. Some investigating and help from the ANT folks later, and I have a solution

So, when I ran my ant build, all went well until the runTest target executed (or at least tried to execute). I got the following build error:

Execute failed: java.io.IOException: debugPlayerMac.app cannot execute

You see the problem is that on a mac, the standalone player (like other applications on the Mac) is actually a folder containing all sorts of cleverness inside. Ant doesn't know how to execute a folder, so I was a bit stuck. Until, after lots of digging, I found the answer in an old osflash mailing list archive. Basically I have to use the 'open' command to launch the app - something like this:

<exec executable="open">

    <arg line="${pathToFlashPlayer}"/>

    <arg line="${pathToSWFToPlay}"/>

</exec>

<target name="runTest" description="runs the test harness" depends="compileTest">

	 <parallel>

		 <exec executable="open" spawn="no">

		 	 <arg line="${debugPlayer}"	/>

		     <arg line="'${testHarness.swf}'"/> 

		 </exec>

		 <sequential>

			 <waitfor>

			 	<available file="${flashlog.location}"/>

			 </waitfor>

		     <waitfor>

		     	<isfileselected file="${flashlog.location}">

		     		<contains text="-----------------TESTRUNNEROUTPUTENDS----------------"/>

		     	</isfileselected>

		     </waitfor>

		 </sequential>

	</parallel>

</target>

<target name="runTest" description="runs the test harness" depends="compileTest">

	 <parallel>

		 <exec executable="${debugPlayerWin}" spawn="no" os="Windows XP">

		     <arg line="'${testHarness.swf}'"/> 

		 </exec>

		 <exec executable="open" spawn="no" os="Mac OS X">

		 	 <arg line="${debugPlayerMac}"	/>

		     <arg line="'${testHarness.swf}'"/> 

		 </exec>

		 <sequential>

			 <waitfor>

			 	<available file="${flashlog.location}"/>

			 </waitfor>

		     <waitfor>

		     	<isfileselected file="${flashlog.location}">

		     		<contains text="-----------------TESTRUNNEROUTPUTENDS----------------"/>

		     	</isfileselected>

		     </waitfor>

		 </sequential>

	</parallel>

</target>

I'm planning to post my completed project build script and step through it in more detail than I did previously. I've updated it quite a lot in the last year, and so far, I think its a lot neater. Before I do that, I'm going to post about my removing the python dependency from my CI process.

Posted by Paul BH at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags | Continuous Integration | FlexUnit

OK, so for those of you who know Unix better than me (which is probably most of you) this post will be like teaching your granny to suck eggs, but for the rest of us, it took me some working out how to stop and start the cruisecontrol server instance on the mac...

You see, on windows, I just press ctrl+c and the process terminates so you can then restart the sever. Well, on the mac, that doesn't happen; if you ctrl+c, the server instance still runs. So, thanks to some friendly assistance, I found out how to kill the server. What you need to do first is type ps -e. This will list all the processes running. The one you are looking for will look something like this:
3267 p2 S 0.15.38 /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home/bin/java -Djavax.management.build.
When you have that, note the PID, and then type kill -9 XXXX where XXXX is the pid you found in the previous step.

Posted by Paul BH at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Tags | Continuous Integration

So, I've got this shiny new mac provided by my new employers, and so I figured I'd put it to use as a CruiseControl build manager. I found the process reasonably simple but, just like the process of setting up Subversion and SCPlugin, there are a couple of extra steps I figured I'd share...

First step, download the latest source from the downloads page here. Simply expand that to where you want your CruiseControl instance to live. Next open up a terminal window, and type the following:
cruisecontrol.sh
More than likely, you will get the following error message:
-bash: cruisecontrol.sh: command not found
More hunting on the mighty intergoogle and a quick look at 'bash guide for beginners' told me the answer - I need to tell bash which shell to use to execute the cruisecontrol.sh script. I found either of the following lines worked:
sh cruisecontrol.sh
bash -x cruisecontrol.sh
I'm not a Unix geek, so I don't pretend to know what the difference is, or which is preferable - if anyone can tell me I'd love to know..

Posted by Paul BH at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Tags | Continuous Integration | Best Practices | Test Driven Development

I just had to sort out getting subversion up and running on a mac. It's not quite as simple a process as on a PC; there are a couple of extra steps I thought I'd share...

So, the first step is to make sure you're logged in with admin rights, then go and grab the latest copy of subversion from here

When you have downloaded this, run it and let it do its magic, and you should have subversion installed. To confirm, open a terminal window (Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and type svn. At this stage, its entirely likely you get a 'command not found' error. So after ab bit of digging on the intergoogle I found that someone had the same problem and fixed it by typing the following into the terminal:
sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/svn /usr/bin/svn
This adds a link from the svn binary in your local bin folder to /usr/bin

Type in svn and you should now see the more helpful message Type 'svn help' for usage.. So far so good, you can now use svn on the command line. But if you're anything like me, I want my source control to be seamless and have finder integration. Enter SCPlugin.

SCPlugin is an open source plugin based on the idea of TortoiseSVN. Its not quite as mature as TortoiseSVN, but I've found it to be pretty good, barring one gotcha I'll deal with in a minute. For now, download the latest version, and look at the installation instructions. Now when I pull up a contextual menu, I should see a subversion submenu. It doesn't have all subversion commands, but it certainly has the ones I use day to day.

I thought I was doing pretty well, until I tried to checkout the latest source from one of my projects. I got a nasty error:

Error: PROPFIND request failed on '/path/to/SVN'
Error: PROPFIND '/path/to/SVN': could not connect to server (https://sample.svnserver.domain)

more hunting on the intergoogle uncovered a similar problem with Tortoise, so I figured it might be the same thing. Basically my svn repository under https has a self-signed certificate, and SCPlugin just spits the dummy when it comes across this. I went back to my Terminal window and tried to checkout from there:

svn co http://path/to/repos/ 

Error validating server certificate for 'https://xxxxx':

 - The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use the

   fingerprint to validate the certificate manually!

 - The certificate hostname does not match.

Certificate information:

 - Hostname: eyefodder.com

 - Valid: from Jul 22 15:51:42 2004 GMT until Jul  5 15:51:42 2015 GMT

 - Issuer: Eyefodder, uk

 - Fingerprint: d9:86:9c:31:2a:xx:d2:xx:20:08:f6:78:a6:0f:46:27:a4:52:d1:7b

(R)eject, accept (t)emporarily or accept (p)ermanently?