Communicating with external systems using ElectricCommander (continued)

In an earlier blog post I coveredhow to push information from internal systems into ElectricCommander . Since then we have some new developments which are released already or coming in ElectricCommander 4.2.

The plugin allows ElectricCommander to easily manipulate jobs or get information from a Jenkins instance. We have many customers who successfully use ElectricCommander with Jenkins but we wanted to make the integration even easier and decided to create a plugin. The plugin is available in the ElectricCloud plugins catalog at http://plugins.electric-cloud.com . From the catalog the plugin documentation can be browsed or the plugin downloaded directly.

Starting with ElectricCommander 4.2 a Java API will be available for ElectricCommander. This will allow code written in Java to communicate directly with ElectricCommander without needing the ElectricCommander tools to be installed on the system where the program will be run or having to make XML-RPC calls. I’ll be providing Java API usage examples in a blog post when ElectricCommander 4.2 is released.

With the upcoming 4.2 release we have made enhancements so that objects can be manipulated in JSON format. This has proven to give improvements in two key areas:

1. API call performance

2. Code readability

You can see an example on the public ElectricCloud github repository https://github.com/electriccommunity/electriccommander/blob/controller/electriccommander-json-examples/getResourcesJson.pl
Stay tuned for examples on each of these features in the coming weeks.