Autobuild — Build and Deployment Automation Solution

Autobuild is our enterprise build and deployment automation solution for Java EE, WebSphere Portal and Process Server applications.

Autobuild automates the application development lifecycle: compile, package, deploy and test. This includes automated deployment to IBM WebSphere® line of products and their automated configuration.

You can use Autobuild as your end-to-end build/deployment automation tool or you can pick and choose Autobuild features a la carte and integrate them with your existing scripts.

Autobuild provides the following key features:

• Build and deployment automation without Ant scripts or complex XML files
  Autobuild infers most of the information about projects and their environments from Eclipse project files, project's directory structure, application server parameters and other existing configuration artifacts. For example, Autobuild obtains information about compile and package dependencies from the classpath defined in Eclipse. Autobuild decides how to build a project based on the collected information and property file-based "hints" optionally provided by developers.

• Support for building and packaging of JAR, WAR, EAR, portlets, portal themes, SCA applications, Web services, EJB 3/2
  Autobuild performs all standard build tasks, including Java compilation, XML validation,and packaging in JAR, WAR and EAR formats. Additionally, Autobuild supports static code analysis via its integration with FindBugs™ tool. If needed, Autobuild will run WebSphere tasks to generate the code. For example serviceDeploy task runs automatically as part of SCA application packaging before deploying the application to WebSphere ESB and Process Server products.

• Automated deployment to WebSphere Application Server 6.0/6.1/7.0, Portal Server 6.1, ESB/Process Server 6.2
  Autobuild installs applications to target application servers or clusters, distributes applications to nodes and starts them up. Autobuild can restart application server instances if needed. An application can be installed on any combination of clusters and servers, including support for multi-clustered WebSphere Portal cells. Portlet applications, portal themes and individual portlets are automatically registered in WebSphere Portal. Custom XML configuration interface (a.k.a. XMLAcces) files to create portal pages are supported as well.
  For WebSphere ESB/Process Server applications, Autobuild can automatically update export/import binding parameters and promoted properties to adjust application settings to a particular environment.

• Support for WebSphere DataPower XML appliances
  Autobuild provides targets for uploading WSDL, schema and XSLT files to an appliance as well as targets for importing DataPower configurations.

• Support for unit testing, functional and integration testing
  Autobuild integrates with JUnit, HTTPUnit, Canoo WebTest and Eviware soapUI. It can automatically execute tests during the build (JUnit) and after the application is deployed (WebTest, soapUI). You can specify different tests suites for different environment and different build types. This allows to, for example, run full test suite in development environment and a smaller sub-set in "higher" environments for smoke testing.

• Extensibility using standard Ant scripts
  Autobuild can be extended and customized using standard Ant files. There are no special APIs or plugins. You can override any built-in Autobuild target or add your custom targets and tasks. You can also invoke Autobuild targets from any Ant file. That way, you can extend your existing build scripts with Autobuild-provided functionality.

Please refer to our detailed list of features for more information.