The client I’m working for wants to set up Cruise Control or another tool to assist with the continuous integration of their project code.

I heard Erik Hatcher say a year ago that he prefers Anthill over Cruise Control for its ease of use, and Franz Garsomke, a past advocate of Cruise Control, said last year he would use Anthill on his next project when he spoke at the Denver JUG.

Going with Antill sems a no-brainer, right?

Well, I started reading a comparison of the two people have posted on Ward Cunningham’s wiki. From what the posters say, Cruise Control’s 2.1 version has improved, and most of the cricisms are no longer valid. The biggest difference between Anthill and Cruise Control that matter to me is Anthill is a servlet application, so must be hosted on an app server. Cruise Control, apparently, is a program you also can run from a command line or run via cron(8) or even as a Windows service, with a free program to run a Java application as a service.

With what I’ve read so far, I’m leaning toward Anthill because it sounds like it will be easier to set up for our project, and provides more web-based feedback. The server that will run the CI tool at my client’s site is a Windows server. I think I’ll have more luck installing Tomcat on their box than trying to configure Cruise Control to be run as a Windows service at boot time.

I’ll let you know how it goes.