vendredi, décembre 19, 2008

Continuum experiment

As I'm injecting all the Directory projects into Continuum, I try to get used with the GUI. There are many areas of improvement, to make the user's life easier.

  1. The fact that you have to login to be able to configure your project is obvious. But the place the 'login' link has been put (ie, on the left part of the orange bar under the logo) plus the police size selected, makes it a bit un-user friendly. I would have preferred either a centered form, or at least, having it on the right part of the screen, bold and wide, as many of the similar applications.
  2. I don't see any reason why we should inject a scm tag in the pom.xml, as we _already_ set the pom's URL in continuum.
  3. When you add a new project into a group, you can't change the project's name, as it's extracted from the pom. You have to edit the project after it has been created. Time consuming...
  4. The very same for the configuration : you don't have any choice until the project has been created.
  5. You can't delete the mail notifications sent to notifications@XXXX. Too bad if you don't have such a mailing list !
  6. When you inject a project with modules, the default should be to _not_ add every module as a separate project (for X sake, this is why we use modules !)
  7. The left menu is a bit too heavy. I don't care to have the legends, it makes me think I can click on the icons...
  8. It would be very cool to be able to copy/paste a project : as I'm using it using different configurations (JDK versions, etc), it's a bit time consuming to repeat the project creation more than once...
  9. Adding a new mail notification is done by clicking on a 'submit' button... I was expecting an 'add' button instead :/
Ok, that's for the cons. Not any of those are show stoppers, they are just little annoyance making you feel like you could use another CI, like Hudson.

Otherwise, it's pretty slick, and most important, IT DOES THE JOB !

Update :
Another big issue : if you create a project twice (sharing the same pom), you can't associate a specific configuration for each of those projects. For instance, if you set a project to use Java 5, and the other to use Java 6, then the last configuration will be applied to both projects. Damn bug !

JIRA, be ready :)