eclipse: Automatic branch compilation checking

Question

I have a task to check compilation of code from one of our branches, lets call it "stable". Our team mainly working in "HEAD" branch and sometimes making some merges to "stable" branch. I've made a local copy of our main workspace and named it "main-workspace-stable" and replaced all of the code by code from "stable" branch. Now at the end of every work day I open that workspace, update the code to the most recent and wait for the compilation result.
This is pretty boring. Is there any ways to automate that task?

Answer 1

You might want to look at one of the Continuous Integration tools, for example Cruise Control or Hudson.

Answer 2

As mentioned by ChssPly76, Continuous Integration is the way to implement what you want to do.

Regarding Hudson, I can mention hudson-eclipse, in order for you to monitor a Hudson health icon, displayed at the bottom of the Eclipse window. The icon is red on build failure and green on success.

You can couple that with an automatic publication of your project as a maven snapshot artifact (also triggered by Hudson).
And have Maven compile your Eclipse project in that special Continuous Integration Environment.
The idea is not to rely on a pure Eclipse solution, because eclipse cannot be up and running every environment, especially those where you do not actively develop, but only compile and launch tests.