How we cook GitHub, Jira and Jenkins with Domino

Why would I use it?

I'll describe briefly how we use GitHub, Jira and Jenkins together to make better development process. More details will come later when I get some desire :). OK, lets look what benefits we have from using these tools.

GitHub with Jenkins

GitHub has number of Service Hooks and one of them is for Jenkins. It allows to trigger build jobs when pushes are made to GitHub. You don't need to have any skill to do that, let's look on screen below. So once you made a push, Jenkins start to work.

GitHub with JIRA

It's possible to made connection between JIRA and GitHub, so once you made push to GitHub JIRA will update related ticket, you only need to specify ticket number in comments. As a result you will have history with commits directly in JIRA ticket. Let's look on ticket I've closed few days ago.

You can see what exactly have been done in order to fix the ticket. Also you can get more details if you wish, you only need to click on any of those updated files and then you will see that

Jenkins and Domino

That is most complicated part. In order to synchronize changes from GitHub to Domino application we use Jenkins (if you remember once push happens we trigger hook on Jenkins). Unfortunately there are no plugins that could do that, instead you have to write your own. That's it why we have ~60 seconds delay (I mentioned it in previous posts) after push.

Summary

For me JIRA and GitHub is de facto standard our days. Jenkins in our case is necessary to use in order to push changes from GitHub to Domino. It's a bit complicated process so you need before, if it is really what you need.

Other articles in this series

1. How we build our web applications based on Domino
2. Split back-end and front-end areas, they should not block each other and be independent as much as it is possible.
3. Front-end guys should not have any knowledge about Domino, they don't need IBM Designer installed at all.
4. Back-end guys must have knowledge about Domino, however they don't need to use IBM Designer, only in very rare cases. Backend should be done using only Java (no LS/SSJS/@Formula etc)
5. Using Git+Jira is must and Jenkins server as builder server
6. Auto-tests.

How we build our web applications based on Domino

Intro

I've been working with Domino for many years (however very possible less than many of you :-), I started to work with version 5 at the beginning and in few months we migrated to 6.X). I worked in few companies with absolutely different projects and processes of development. There were lot of 'hell projects' (without any structure inside, just mess) and few really 'cool projects' where I could learn something. I always tried to bring the best of the old projects into new. Now I'd like to describe how we develop applications in Domino today. No revolution in our approach, however I believe that is quite good one. The only required thing in that process - you must have time and desire to change process.

Team and projects

We are small and quite typical team: few back-end and front-end developers, manager and no QA as we do not do mistakes :). Roll out each 2 weeks with new features. We are developing CMS that manage external websites of our company.

Few very important points about websites we are doing here:

• website's pages have to load extremely fast (means 200-400 ms to load page);
• clean HTML, all (!) tags, attributes, javascripts should be controlled;
• easy roll out from development environment to production environment without any interrupt for users.

Process of development

Now let's look on most important points of development process. I'll describe each point more deeply in upcoming posts this week. Possibly I will add more points during that time, lets see.

1. Split back-end and front-end areas, they should not block each other and be independent as much as it is possible.
2. Front-end guys should not have any knowledge about Domino, they don't need IBM Designer installed at all.
3. Back-end guys must have knowledge about Domino, however they don't need to use IBM Designer, only in very rare cases. Backend should be done using only Java (no LS/SSJS/@Formula etc)
4. Using Git+Jira is must and Jenkins server as builder server
5. Auto-tests.

We've done almost all the list, some areas require some improvements however concept works and now it's only question of time. All front-end developers do not use IBM Designer in their daily job, back-end developers still use it (rarely), everything goes to GitHub, and then Jenkins take care about rest. That image illustrate what we have.

You are welcome to give your comments, idea, suggestions or something negative about that, everything can help and improve or process and wait for new posts soon :)

Other articles in this series

1. How we build our web applications based on Domino
2. Split back-end and front-end areas, they should not block each other and be independent as much as it is possible.
3. Front-end guys should not have any knowledge about Domino, they don't need IBM Designer installed at all.
4. Back-end guys must have knowledge about Domino, however they don't need to use IBM Designer, only in very rare cases. Backend should be done using only Java (no LS/SSJS/@Formula etc)
5. Using Git+Jira is must and Jenkins server as builder server
6. Auto-tests.