The build process in IBM® Integration Toolkit Version 10 Fix Pack 2 lends itself to straightforward automation using various open source components. In this post, we demonstrate a means of achieving continuous integration using some popular open source technologies, such as Git (version 1.7.1) for version control, Apache Ant (version 1.7.1) for build automation, and Jenkins (version 1.630) for continuous integration.

A number of articles have been published on automating the installation of the IBM Integration Bus runtime using software such as IBM UrbanCode Deploy and Chef; for a summary of these, please refer to How to automate IBM Integration Bus deployments using IBM UrbanCode Deploy and Chef by Simon Holdsworth. His article describes, among other things, a way to deploy pre-packaged integration solutions (BAR files) to the IBM Integration Bus runtime. While we also give a possible solution to the same problem, we will be more focused on building and packaging the integration applications efficiently.

The build environment used in this demonstration consists of Git, Apache Ant and Jenkins along with IBM Integration Bus Version 10 Fix Pack 2 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.6. We also make use of a development environment on the same host, running the IBM Integration Toolkit, and hosting a Git repository which acts as, using Git terminology, the remote origin for the build process.

We are looking to automate the following segment of a typical development & test workflow (Figure 1):