Going to Agile 2009? Cannot get enough Hudson? I have put together a list of sessions at the conference that will explicitly mention the best CI server eveeeer ;-):
OK, I do prefer Hudson (I am a contributor, after all). But I also watch the competition… err, I mean, like the other tools ;-) Here are other presentations I could find that mention competitors to Hudson:
- (CruiseControl) Agile Source Code Management using Stories, Agile Workflow, and CI,by Damon Poole
- (CruiseControl) Creating Habitable Code: Lessons in Longevity from CruiseControl, by Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius
- (CruiseControl) Build Engineer Bootcamp: Builds As Code, by Jeffrey Fredrick and Paul Julius: though not explicitly about CruiseControl, the hosts are the main contributors to CruiseControl, so expect to hear about it!
- (CruiseControl) Continuous Integration: Your New Best Friend, by Howard Deiner
- (Bamboo) Automated deployment with Maven and friends – going the whole nine yards, by John Smart: though it does mention Hudson, the focus will be on Bamboo
- (Bamboo) Large scale continuous integration, by Hannu Kokko: the session outlines does not explicitly says so, but it seems that Bamboo is part of the toolset
I think I have finally fixed (most) errors in the display of the French translation in Hudson. 3 different people reported them to me, which is a sign that Hudson enjoys a strong following in France (I also keep stumbling on French Hudson fans in conferences and my colleague Eric Le Merdy has just released a new Hudson plugin for Nabaztag).
The root of the problem is that I incorrectly thought that properties should be encoded in UTF-8 (in fact, only help pages in HTML should be). In practice, properties files should stay in classic ISO 8859-1.
I didn’t keep trace of which files I had incorrectly converted to UTF-8 and I don’t know of a tool that could check that for me (if you know of one, do let me know). So there is still a chance that some files remain in the incorrect format. If you find any, please create a bug report.
The fix should be available with the next release of Hudson, v.1.269, which should be a matter of days, according to history. My progress on the French translation are listed on the Hudson wiki.
Apologies to all that were inconvenienced by this bug.
Yep, you heard it here first: Uncle Bob loves Hudson!
Not content with the videos on Slim, he has just produced another one showing how to do basic staff with Hudson. And by the sound of his voice, he is sold!
Inteerstingly, he compares the simple startup process of Hudson to the one in Fitnesse: just download and run.
Update (14/12/08): Uncle Bob has actually put online his Hudson install
Julian has just posted on YouTube videos he took during the CI Showdown at CITCON Amsterdam last October. Sound quality is not very good, so make sure you are in a quiet environment.
Finally! I have been waiting for this for a while. From v1.259, Hudson is now able to update itself automatically (as long as you have installed Hudson as a Windows Service — granted, this might not be the general case).
Another enhancement in v1.259 is that a Hudson distribution can be bundled with plugins. Hudson will extract them properly at first run (which it didn’t do before). Cool, too.
Valtech Days are starting tomorrow! We are all very excited.
I will be presenting 3 things:
- Retrospectives: the key to continuous improvement, together with Laurent Bossavit
- A 15-mins demonstration of Hudson
- Introduction to the Open Space part of the conference
If you will be attending this conference, please come and say hi!
I came back this morning from the conference, my third time after Brussels in 07 and London in 06. It was great as usual. If you haven’t been to an Open Space conference, know that you are seriously missing out on something.
There are quite a few things to take away
- there is a surprisingly large number of CI tools, especially commercial; we had a demo of 7; CruiseControl by Paul Julius, build-o-matic by Ivan Moore, Hudson by yours truly, JetBrains TeamCity by Pavel Sher & Yegor Yarko, Rational BuildForge by Lieuwe, Zutubi Pulse2 by Jason Sankey, ThoughtWorks Cruise by Chris Read. Many others were not represented. I don’t quite understand why the market is so fragmented.
- CI tools get less interest than before; there were still a few sessions on CI (CI Tools Showdown, Future of CI…) but fewer than usual. Remember that CI is still the main reason why people come to this conference. Instead, more discussions about Agile in general, and on automated functional testing in particular
- Chris Read from ThoughtWorks wants to push for Open CI, an effort to standardize the storage format of CI tools, so that they can get integrated more easily with other (non-CI) tools, such as Trac, Mingle, etc.
Some advanced features that seemed interesting:
- personal builds (Pulse & TeamCity)
- pipelines (Cruise); I think someone mentioned working on such things in the past, though I cannot find traces of it right now.
- build templates (Pulse); you define things such as a JDK configuration, SVN connection in a template, and you optionally override them in actual jobs that inherit from them. Some (French) people came to me after the conference to explicitely request this on Hudson! I think Hudson is big in France.
- build steps parallelized (BuildForge, Cruise, others?); in a complex job, you can mark some consecutive steps (say, integration tests and acceptance tests) and get them to run in parallel instead
- real time display of the number of tests passing/failing (TeamCity)
- find out exactly who broke the build (build-o-matic)
Interestingly, most commercial tools have a free version (limited to 1 or 2 machines) and charge by the number of slaves (I didn’t realized that slaves were such in demand). Costs are around 10,000USD / year for 10 slaves.
For more on the conference, check out:
The next CITCON will be in Minneapolis/St Paul on April 17 & 18. Then, Brisbane in June. And CITCON Europe 09 is still TBD.
Oh, and Steve Freeman coined “Scrum is the new RUP”. I need a t-shirt with that.
Updates (06/10/08): it is Lieuwe, not Louis, who demoed BuildForge. Cleared up that Cruise is the only one doing pipelines and that it supports //ized steps.
My Fit plugin for Hudson and the translation into French got approved for the GAP program. This means I am going to receive money from Sun! I am going to be rich, rich, rich!
Err… not quite. Once the 30% tax is taken away by the US government (I probably qualify to get it reduced, but sorting out the paperwork is just too cumbersome), plus some possible tax by the French government, plus conversion into the I’m-feeling-high-these-days euros, I should end up with barely enough for a meal for two in Paris.
Oh well, who I am to complain? I would probably have done the work without any money anyway.
Update (09/04/09): fixed dead URL for the translation
I have only mentioned once Sonar in the past on this blog. I should do that more often, as it is truly a great tool. If you read French, please check out my report on a presentation that Freddy Mallet, the Product Owner for Sonar, did on our premises a couple of weeks ago.
For today, I just wanted to mention that Hudson and Sonar, currently two of my favorite tools, have been brought together. This Hudson plugin makes sure that Sonar metrics are obtained from the current job. Good stuff!
Readers to this blog know that I take every opportunity to talk about Hudson, one of the very best Continuous Integration tools. Well, I have another very good reason: you can contribute to it and make money, at least if you let yourself known before the end of June.
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The French translation of Hudson is a contribution I have made to the project. The work is complete for the core part of Hudson, and I consider it stable, though many bits are not internationalized, hence appear in English.
What can you do if you want to help?
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That’s what you get when you spend several days polishing a post. Unlike what I suggested in my previous post from today, Sun does seem to take action regarding Hudson. Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Hudson creator, has just been promoted to working on Hudson full-time. I’m jealous ;-)
Congratulations, Kohsuke! You deserve it.
I thought it’d be interesting to look at some download statistics for Hudson and CruiseControl, probably the 2 OpenSource CI tools with the most mindshare currently.
Want to know more about CruiseControl, Hudson, and other CI tools? Meet the creators, contributers and users at the next CITCON conference in Melbourne, June 27th & 28th. Cannot make it to Melbourne? Then CITCON Amsterdam, October 3 & 4 is for you (I know I‘ll be there). Or CITCON Minneapolis, April 17 & 18, 2009.
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The JavaPosse podcast #178 mentions that Hudson has reached version 1.200 in 2 years and a half. The hosts made jokes on the number of releases… well, by the time they aired on April 8th, Hudson had actually reached 1.205. And by the time I listened to the podcast on April 10th, we had reached 1.206. So there! ;-)
The North-American edition of CITCON, the conference on Continuous Integration and Testing is over. Check out the session notes on the conference wiki.
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