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.
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.
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.
On projects that I see, most are using a Continuous Integration tool. Many, however, still do not use those tools to their fullest. Here is what I typically set up on projects that I have control on.
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I have finally been able to make some progress towards translating Hudson in French. The latest version (1.181) will now display automatically in French if your web browser is appropriately configured.
On a project I’m involved in, we are programming both in Java and Python. The Java part has been written TDD-style, with Hudson as the CI tool from the beginning. I’ve tried to promote unit testing and CI for the Python part as well, but little progress has been made.
So I am pleased to see a very positive experience report on integrating Hudson with Python. Not only was the code packaged and unit tested, but reports were also shown for both quality metrics and tests. Very encouraging!
After doing it at AgileOpen, I again had the chance to demonstrate Hudson. The attendants had all proved their CI credentials, to say the least, as they included developers on AnthillPro, Build-o-matic, and CruiseControl, of course (how many CC developers in the room? at least 6, I’d say).
I think my point that Hudson was the easy, very usable alternative, went well, but they were more impressed with the combinations matrix feature (I personally think that the killer feature is the simpleness of the form where a job is defined).
At the evening drinks, one or two people asked whether I was part of the development team, which was flattering. I guess I should consider getting more involved, but there are already so many things I want to do, and so little time! How do all these guys do?!
The crazy (8 releases in the past 30 days!) Hudson dev team has just introduced a new feature. They call it a ‘matrix project’. The idea is that a configuration would often be common to many builds. Say, one for each operating systems, times each supported JDK, times each supported database environments, etc. You could end up with dozens copies of the same Hudson configuration.
To work around this, it is now possible to specify each JDK we are targeting, plus environments variables. All combinations of parameters are then tested.
After a session on Agile Tooling, I suggested a demo of Hudson. I thought that went rather well.
For me, Hudson is definitely the best CI tool today. It is still a bit young but it is so easy to use that it is a breeze to switch to it.
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