Update: So many people seem to keep coming to this blog post from Mike Clark's blog that I feel it might make sense to mention that the WeblogPublisher has been incorporated into the CruiseControl distribution already a while ago. In other words, no need to download the stuff from the attached URLs--just use a recent enough version of CruiseControl and you're all set.

As I mentioned earlier, I set out to write a new publisher for CruiseControl.

I just added support for MetaWeblog API to go with the Blogger API. It was very straight-forward since it also uses XML-RPC.

This is what it looks like right now:

To start using it, just throw the publisher class to your CruiseControl main/src/net/sourceforge/cruisecontrol/publishers directory, download xmlrpc-1.2-b1.jar into the main/lib directory, rebuild cruisecontrol.jar with ant jar, and add these to your CruiseControl config.xml:

<cruisecontrol>
    <project name="foo">
        <plugin name="weblog" classname="net.sourceforge.cruisecontrol.publishers.WeblogPublisher"/>
        ...
        <publishers>
            <weblog blogurl="http://buildserver:8080/blog/xmlrpc"
                    api="metaWeblog|blogger"
                    blogid="blog"
                    username="lasse"
                    password="secret"
                    category="cruisecontrol"
                    reportsuccess="fixes"
                    subjectprefix="[CruiseControl]"
                    buildresultsurl="http://buildserver:8080/cruisecontrol/buildresults/myproject"
                    logdir="/cruisecontrol/logs/myproject"
                    xsldir="/cruisecontrol/reporting/jsp/xsl"
                    css="/cruisecontrol/reporting/jsp/css/cruisecontrol.css"/>
        </publishers>
    </project>
</cruisecontrol>

You can download the source code from:
WeblogPublisher.java (the publisher)
WeblogPublisherTest.java (unit tests)

This is hilarious! I've been running it on the background while browsing around for approximately 7 minutes and counting...

Thanks, Juha.

Prefer simple code over neat tricks. You'll thank yourself later on...

It seems that XDoclet is still hot stuff after all these years... Looking at the project's home page, I spotted this:

A lot of people (over 60.000 downloads (see activity statistics) in 2002, 95.000 in 2003 and already more than 90.000 in 2004 (September)! An average of 7.000 page views each day!) are already improving development time by using XDoclet for development of J2EE applications.

Evidence of how it takes several years for a new open source project to get into mainstream? Is XDoclet already mainstream? I'm not using it myself but I'm also not using EJB's so that might explain it...

Update: So many people seem to keep coming to this blog post from Mike Clark's blog that I feel it might make sense to mention that the WeblogPublisher has been incorporated into the CruiseControl distribution already a while ago. In other words, no need to download the stuff from the attached URLs--just use a recent enough version of CruiseControl and you're all set.

Well, since Mike hinted that it would be easy, I couldn't resist spending an hour to hack together a BloggerWeblogPublisher.java which posts the build results to a specified weblog using the Blogger API.

Just throw the publisher class to your CruiseControl directory, download xmlrpc-1.2-b1.jar into the lib directory, rebuild cruisecontrol.jar, and add these to your CruiseControl config.xml:

<cruisecontrol>
    <project name="foo">
        <plugin name="weblog" classname="net.sourceforge.cruisecontrol.publishers.BloggerWeblogPublisher"/>
        ...
        <publishers>
            <weblog blogurl="http://localhost:8080/pebble/xmlrpc"
                    blogid="blog"
                    username="lasse"
                    password="password"
                    category="CruiseControl"
                    reportsuccess="always"
                    subjectprefix="[CruiseControl]"
                    buildresultsurl="http://buildserver:8080/cruisecontrol/buildresults"                                                          logdir="/cruisecontrol/logs/foo"
                    xsldir="/cruisecontrol/reporting/jsp/xsl"
                    css="/cruisecontrol/reporting/jsp/css/cruisecontrol.css"/>

        </publishers>
    </project>
</cruisecontrol>

It's far from finished, but it seems to be "usable" already if you're itching to see your build results in your RSS aggregator. I'll submit it to the CruiseControl committers when it's a bit more polished...

The code is based on CruiseControl's EmailPublisher and HTMLEmailPublisher.

Brian Marick has posted a bunch of useful tips for agile projects struggling with getting customer collaboration going smoothly.

I see that Keith Ray has got a reading problem as well. Coincidentally, I've got 4 of his 8 books on my bookshelf, two of which I've read. Oh, actually I've only got 3 of them on my bookshelf. A co-worker loaned the fourth one...

Martin Fowler himself has stepped up and written a little story about how ThoughtWorks had dealt with a client requiring a fixed-price contract in a bliki entry aptly named ScopeLimbering.

Michael, I'm terribly sorry but I'd prefer taking a pillow to some of the meetings I've attended during my short career. The NerdHerder does have a point about writing things down, though.

Steve Freeman has started to wonder whether his right-handedness has an identity problem. Don't worry, Steve. I believe it's quite common for one's weaker hand to develop into more of a "surgical instrument" and the stronger hand to become a hammer too clumsy for pushing those little buttons...

On the Ruby front, Bill Caputo is taking on a challenge while Charles Miller is facing the ugly face of reality elsewhere. I'm still waiting for Christmas, though ;)

Finally, I find it quite amusing that Ron Jeffries is paraphrasing Red Green :)