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.