A visit to the Gaming Veterans (aka "Spieleveteranen")

Some days ago I was able to take part in the latest edition of the Gaming Veterans' Podcast and, thus, was able to chat with some of the old stagers of German gaming journalism: Heinrich Lenhardt, Anatol Locker, Winnie Forster and Jörg Langer may not be known to international readers, but are quite famous amongst German retro gamers. For the last years I've had my share of contact with them through my German retro mag site Kultpower.de and I can assure you that they're nice guys whose experience and competence in the games business blow you away every single time. 

But this time, I had something to tell to them and to all the listeners out there: What's the gist of our project OREGAMI?

Here's the digest:

• we want to give birth to a new, open and comprehensive online database about everything related to the world of computer and video games.
• we want to found a non-profit association to host the project organizationally, legally and financially. The details can be found here.
• we are actively searching for new team members in order to be able to fulfill our self-created time schedule.
• right now we're looking for Java programmers. More info for hackers are here.
• soonish we will be looking for Law experts to, exemplary, discuss licensing issues regarding database contents, screen shots, etc.. The respective discussion takes place here in the forums [German].
• upcoming will be our search for Designers for a cool and fresh, but usable look of our website. Interested people can show up and discuss with us right now, too, of course. :-)

So well, if you know some German, then listen to the podcast, read through our open forums, register, partake! If you don't know German, then skip the podcast and the reading, just register and comment in the English section of our forums. Only together we will be able to tackle such a huge project. 

Technical three-way with Jenkins, Git and Tomcat

The goal was clear: Our Java code shall be regularly compiled by a Jenkins build server, then deployed to our Tomcat server. So far, so good. But implementing this automatic workflow saw quite some obstacles to jump over.

When it comes to code versioning my personal programming past mainly brought me close to CVS and Subversion, but both don't really hold up any more today, so I decided to use git for source code maintenance. And because so many famous projects cannot be wrong, I chose Github as our online hosting service for this.

For professional reasons I am used to my program code being built at least once a day, so the Jenkins build server was an obvious choice. And a Tomcat server for our Java web service should be an easy target to deploy to, or so I thought.