First off, is autotest and cruisecontrol performing the same sort of CI tasks?
I want to setup something that will run my unit tests, and also integration tests on my local MBP computer i.e. I don't have a seperate computer for this yet.
Is autotest something that runs everytime you change a file while cruisecontrol something that runs at a more periodic basis like once every checkin or something?
Does it put a big strain on the computer?
Autotest and cruisecontrol are 2 different tools in may opinion. Autotest help you running the necessary tests each time you change something in your application. That works nicely in your local environment, so you get feedback automatically without having to remember to run the tests are having changed source code (or test code).
Cruicecontrol is (similar to Hudson / Jenkins / Bamboo / TeamCity / ...) a Continuous Integration Server, which runs defined build jobs when you define it. The following are reasonable alternatives:
It normally gets all its contents (sources, build scripts, configuration, ...) from a source control system like Subversion, Git, ... It is normally used in a smaller or larger team to help integrate the work of different people.
So if you work only on your machine, and do mostly unit tests, autotest should be sufficient. Else you should take in consideration using a CI server (locally), which has of course more overhead, needs more resources.
I do not know what the overhead of cruise control is, but running Hudson locally is a bigger Java program with 500 MB to 1 GB memory hunger. Autotest has nearly no overhead, it just automates what you would elsewhere do manually.
I don't think you want to run your integration tests automatically on each change, perhaps a set of Rake tasks integrated in the CI Server and started manually will do the job.
