My next project is called Spurgeon. A one-line description would be: a peer-to-peer build system. The basic idea is that building things sometimes sucks and wouldn't it be great if you could send out requests for libraries needed and hopefully get responses. This would save you the hassle of building all of your code.
Of course, this really is only useful in Java since a jar file could be built on one OS and then moved to another without issues but a shared object built on Linux couldn't go to Solaris. A possible addition to the system would be checks for operating systems and adding that to the search criteria.
Since responses from peers might never happen, the builder machine would just compile everything after a set length of time to wait.
I'm going to use JXTA for the p2p code and hopefully have Spurgeon be a quasi-wrapper to Ant. First order of business is to create the proper peer groups and have Spurgeon send out simple requests and get answers. After that, hopefully actual files can be moved around.
Posted by Josh at February 5, 2003 01:00 AM | TrackBack