Anthill looks pretty spiffy

Looking to turn on automated builds, I started looking at Cruise Control yesterday. The documentation left a little to be desired and before I had gotten too far I searched to see what other docs there were. That’s when I encountered Anthill, which is an automated build system that runs in a webapp. Anthill is available in both open source and commercial versions. Deploying Anthill was very quick and easy, and all configuration could be done through the web.

I did run into a problem with JDK versions, because we have one project that is 1.3 and others that are 1.4. Anthill Pro ($1,299) allows you to select which JDK to use for each project (plus many other features over the open source version). We’re not ready to commit that much money to the tool. It looks straightforward to add that one feature in, though.

Which leads to an interesting question… Does a vendor with open source and commercial versions of a product accept patches to the open source version that add features that previously only existed in the commercial one?