Software Construction Toolkit Released

By Randall Spangler, Software Engineer - Client Tools Team

If you've ever worked on a cross-platform software project, you know how often changes made on one platform break the build on other platforms. If you're using native project files (Xcode on Mac, makefiles on Linux, etc.), every developer needs access to every platform just to add a single source file. You can use a single makefile shared between all the platforms, but writing a makefile which "Does The Right Thing" on each platform is tricky. On all platforms, you need simple ways to express dependencies, run unit tests, and rebuild individual project components. You need to be able to extend the build tool to cover the 5% of your project that doesn't fit the usual build patterns. Oh, and the tool should be documented, tested, and free of charge.

To meet those challenges, we've written a cross-platform Software Construction Toolkit, built on the Open Source SCons build tool. It's written in Python, and builds on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

In addition to contributing fixes and enhancements back to SCons itself, we've released full source and documentation for the toolkit.

We always look forward to your feedback, so check out the code or an example project and send us your comments in our discussion group.