Introducing “RemObjects Builder”

This month is probably the busiest we’ve had in a long time. Last week, we RTMed a new release of Delphi Prism with many major new features, and also shipped the first beta of Data Abstract for OS X to our testers and pre-order customers. And we’re preparing for what probably will be the most major update to our Data Abstract and RemObjects SDK suite of products for Delphi and .NET in the last year or two, later this month.

So what better time is there to start a new project, right?

What happened was that last week i was sitting at my MacBook and preparing the beta drop for DA/OSX, continuously running my bash-based build script in terminal, finding the next build error (this was the first time i was automating the DA build and getting it all put together) and realizing i really missed FinalBuilder, the excellent tool we use to run the automated builds for our windows products. I shot a few messages out via twitter, and it seems that everyone else did, too!

I figured, a tool was needed to run builds in a more visual way, to allow me to better see what was happening, what was currently building, and at which step things went south if they did. Xcode’s (and by extensions, GCC’s) command line build output is way to verbose to follow along with it in terminal.

So i put a couple hours aside and started “RemObjects Builder”, the tool you see below, which is basically a runner for bash based scripts that lets you see progress and results nicely.

![](http://blogs.remobjects.com/blogs/media/blogs/mh/Builder.small.png)Mind you, the idea here was not to create a full-blown FinalBuilder clone – that’s far too much work, not to mention overkill at least for what i need. I’m perfectly fine with writing and editing build scripts in a text editor (and Builder runs plain shell script files, so the same file can be run in Builder, or in Terminal), i’m mainly interested in the more visual run process.

But who knows what the project takes off to…

I’ve decided to turn this into an open source project hosted at code.remobjects.com, in order to give back to the community, and also to get some more people involved in the project.

For now, the project is still marked as private; there’s still some (many) rough edges, and i don’t want any potential users or contributors turned off by those, but if you’re interested in participating in the project, just sign up on code.remobjects.com and send me your username – i’ll activate the project for you. Hopefully, in a couple weeks we can turn it public so it is accessible by everybody.

Let me know what you think!

ps: no, do not ask what TwinPeaks.framework is ;)