Developer(s) | Urbancode |
---|---|
Stable release | 3.8 / Sep, 2011 |
Operating system | Cross-platform |
Type | Continuous Integration |
License | Proprietary |
Website | www.urbancode.com |
AnthillPro is a continuous integration server from Urbancode.
Released in 2001, AnthillPro is one of the original Continuous Integration servers. It supports distributed as well as cross-platform builds in .Net, Java, C/C++ and other languages. In Late 2011, UrbanCode came out with its suite of tools to enable continuous delivery of software in August, which moved its Anthill Pro product into uBuild and uDeploy. Additional information is available on the AnthillPro website.
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The original Anthill was a simple continuous integration server released in 2001 and still available today. Along with tools such as CruiseControl it helped provide the tooling backbone of continuous integration practices. In 2002 Urbancode released the first commercial edition of AnthillPro. Unlike CruiseControl which at the time was focused purely on providing developers feedback about the health of their builds, AnthillPro was focused on build management and using the results of one project's build as a dependency for other projects. In 2006, Urbancode released the third generation of AnthillPro. This complete rewrite added support for distributed builds, and control over post build lifecycle. Unlike most CI servers that are build centric, AnthillPro began to use the build only as an initial test and to create binary artifacts that are then tested, deployed and promoted through a lifecycle on their way to production release.
The practice of continuous integration is one where developers integrate their changes to a common code line frequently (generally at least once a day) and those integrations are rapidly verified by tests. AnthillPro supports this practice by monitoring (or listening to) the organization's various source control systems and triggering a build when it detects a developer commit. The build provides the first (and usually the most critical) test that verifies the integration. Once the build is complete, AnthillPro captures the build product so that secondary processes like functional tests or deployments to manual QA areas can act on the build. As additional tests are executed, the team can gain greater confidence in the changes.
AnthillPro can gather any reports generated by build or test process and display them on the AnthillPro server's web interface for review by developers, testers or management.
AnthillPro supports automated deployment of a build to a user-configured environment (for example: DEV, QA, STAGE, PROD). Administrators can set up gates between each environment, requiring manual user intervention and providing an audit trail. Role-based security can be set up to control what roles (and thus what users) can deploy to which environment.
AnthillPro is designed to support the release management team's efforts. It provides an audit trail linking a build back to source code and to every deployment and test executed against that build. This helps a release manager asses the readiness of a build to enter production. AnthillPro encourages teams to use a similar automated process for production deployments to those used in earlier environments lowering the risk in a deployment through testing the process.