Electric Cloud has announced the availability of SparkBuild, a free
software build tool that makes developer builds up to 10 times faster than
alternative solutions, the company said.
With SparkBuild, build results are displayed graphically, making it easy to
pinpoint and correct errors, Electric Cloud said. The product
is based on the technology developed for Electric Cloud's commercial
enterprise tools, including the ElectricAccelerator distributed build system
and the ElectricInsight build visualization tool.
"To date, developers have been forced to choose between slow and safe
or fast and dangerous desktop builds," said Mike Maciag, Electric Cloud CEO.
"Electric Cloud solved the build speed and accuracy problem for full
builds with our ElectricAccelerator product. Now we're leveraging our expertise
and technology to provide this benefit on the developer desktop with a free
tool."
One of SparkBuild's key features is the ability to avoid unnecessary work by
automatically reducing a full build to the smallest subset of critical changes,
the company said. Traditional "build avoidance" techniques like
object reuse and incremental builds often break builds, creating more headaches
than they solve. To reliably avoid those problems, developers are forced to recompile
the entire application when making changes, even though an individual's changes
may affect only a small portion of an application.
Indeed, Electric Cloud is taking a different approach to the
problem with subbuilds, a technology that identifies and builds only the
components that are required. This delivers fewer broken
builds, major time savings, and the ability to compile and test
frequently and without affecting the rest of the team—a critical Agile
development practice.
SparkBuild can be downloaded at www.sparkbuild.com.
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