Corticon in Continuous Integration Environments

Learn how you can use Progress Corticon seamlessly in continuous integration projects.

Development teams on complex projects may adopt the practice of continuous integration (CI) to minimize work and address errors quickly. CI requires team members to integrate their work with the main line repository early and often, and it usually involves comprehensive unit testing.

Designed for large development environments, Progress Corticon works seamlessly with CI projects, providing tools that support each of the common best practices. (For a list of common CI best practices, you can see this great list from ThoughtWorks.)

Maintain a Single Source Repository

Because Corticon rule assets are XML files, developers can use version control tools to manage integration. Corticon Studio, an Eclipse-based rule development environment, bundles two plugins that support version control systems—Apache Subversion (SVN) and Git.

Each plugin provides an Eclipse perspective in Studio. The Git plugin also includes command line features. Plugins for other version control systems can be found at marketplace.eclipse.org.

Learn more about installing SVN or Git plugins to manage project assets.

Automate the Build

New additions to the source repository are verified by an automated build which will help uncover problems quickly. Corticon provides two options for the automated builds:

Apache Ant Macros

Apache Ant includes built-in XML-based scripts for compiling, assembling, testing and running Java applications on a target tree. Corticon supplies a set of macros which can be used in the Ant build scripts to incorporate Corticon assets in the automated build. Learn more about creating a build process in Ant.

Command Line Tool corticonManagement

Available for both the Windows and Linux platforms, the corticonManagement utility allows developers to compile Ruleflows into Decision Services, run tests and more. Users can integrate the corticonManagement commands in any build tool which can execute a command line utility. Learn more about the corticonManagement command line utility.

Make Your Build Self-Testing

As part of unit testing prior to integration, rule developers create and run Ruletests inside Corticon Studio. An automated build script can execute these Ruletests as well, using either Apache Ant macros included with Corticon or the corticonManagement command line tool.

Build Every Commit on an Integration Machine

Users can check Corticon XML files into a single source repository. And Corticon provides the tools to build assets from that repository on an integration machine.

Test in A Clone of the Production Environment

The process used for automated builds can deploy Corticon assets to remote servers in a clone production environment. Users can specify a Decision Service on the remote servers as the test subject for Testsheets. And if there are several servers in the test environment, developers can automatically deploy built assets to the Corticon Server Web Console and manage the deployments from there. Learn more about the Web Console.

Make it Easy for Anyone to Get the Latest Executable Version

Developers can check Corticon XML files into the project’s single source repository for anyone on the team to access.

Expose Activity and Results for Everyone to See

The Apache Ant macro and the corticonManagement command line tool provide comprehensive logging capabilities for building and testing assets. The logs include information about problems which occurred during compilation or testing.

Automate Deployment

The automated processes for code integration using Apache Ant macros or the corticonManagement command line tool will work for automated deployment as well. If production servers are remote, developers can use the Corticon Server Web Console to automatically deploy and manage Decision Services on multiple servers.

With Web Console, the administrator can identify server groups for deploying assets. Some groups can include test servers in a clone production environment, and others can specify production servers. Automated build scripts can target one group or several groups as needed. Web Console can support blue-green deployment as well.

Developers can specify versions and effective dates for assets, which allows multiple versions of an asset to coexist in the production or testing environments and gives developers fine-grained control over rollout of new code.

Whether development teams adopt all the CI best practices or just a few, Corticon Studio and Server provide a range of options for supporting each customer’s preferred integration process.

You can try out these CI best practices, or any of the other new features in the latest release, by downloading a trial or requesting a demo today.