Australian company Atlassian offers Bamboo, a continuous integration server.
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Gradle Build Tool (Open Source)
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Gradle is an open source build system. Gradle boasts a rich API and mature ecosystem of plugins and integrations to support automation. Users can model, integrate and systematize the delivery of software from end to end.
I have participated in a variety of build environments, from basic shell scripts, to ant, and to maven. All of these tools have a place, sometimes perhaps in legacy code. But moving forward, I would never go back to other more primitive tools (never say never...). The more I …
If you value integration over cost, Bamboo is clearly the way to go. It offers tight integration to the rest of the Atlassian suite, and when you need traceability from issue to build, Atlassian is the right way to go. However, if you find yourself needing to save on costs, you may consider taking an approach of rolling your own build system with open source alternatives, such as Jenkins, if you don't [mind] putting in a little extra elbow grease.
Gradle is an ideal tool to build an application that is complex and/or distributed. It is well suited for builds that use a CI engine such as Jenkins or Bamboo, and a repository such as Artifactory.
Levels of granularity. Organization has many projects that have many build plans that have many jobs that have many tasks, etc. And branch builds allow source control branches to be built separately.
Versatility. I can use bamboo to manage my Java, node, or .NET build plans. I can use it to spin up Windows or Linux build agents, or install it on a Mac to build there as well.
Bamboo integrates with other Atlassian products like Bitbucket, Stash, JIRA, etc. If a company commits to the entire Atlassian stack then work can be tracked through the whole development lifecycle which is really useful.
Bamboo was fairly easy to navigate but in the end it always felt as if it was developed as a bolt-on and not a true group up user interface. There were multiple ways to get to everything and the path was never the same. So it was difficult for users to really get a feel of how to use the application.
I have tried to use Gradle for projects several times in the past, but there is just so much work in maintaining the build file that it quickly becomes untenable. I have been using Maven for many years, and even though the build file can be complex, it works without maintenance between releases.
Support for Bamboo has started lack a little over the years. Atlassian has been moving more towards Bitbucket Pipelines and away from the on-premise install of Bamboo. While the tool is still great, it may take a little bit of time to get a question answered by official support.
Gradle has been an excellent tool for Android development. It has helped us create multiple versions of the app for different environments. It also takes care of all the packaging needs in the background without having to write all the code related to that. It is a no brainer to use Gradle with Android applications.
We selected Bamboo because its capabilities to integrate with other Atlassian products specially Jira Software, Bitbucket and in some useful scenarios with Confluence. Also, we found these pros important for us: great user interface, easily agent deployment, Docker compability, simply to maintain / manage, and straightforwardly integration with different notification platforms
SBT works fine for Scala but when I tried to use it with Java it was hard to configure and I gave up. Maven is awesome but the pom.xml file tends to be really big which makes it hard to read. Grunt is suitable only for js projects.
It helped us achieve the Continuous Deployment and Continuous Integration goals for our applications, a huge milestone that saved a lot of time for developers in making the builds and deployments and saved time for QA in running the automated tests.
Helped with DevOps: we moved the formal approval from the email to the system and allowed the approver to actually push the button for the production deployments.
Biggest positive impact of using Bamboo is that it improved our response time to customers and increased the frequency of our deliveries to them.
In a distributed development environment, once we established a strong CI/CD model, Gradle proved to be a great choice to automate the various processes. Gradle also provides much flexibility, which is essential in today's development environment. The important benefit is that the CI/CD engineers can support development's needs quickly and reliably. This in turn supports faster testing and deployment, which generates higher ROI.
