|
"Developing Software Collaboratively with Hudson" Learn More About the Open Source Continuous Integration Server
Hudson is an open source continuous integration (CI) server, initially developed by Sun, that brings a new level of efficiency and productivity to collaborative software development. By automating the build-and-test process, Hudson saves time, cuts errors and risks, and brings a higher level of transparency to projects. This paper (log-in or registration required) describes the capabilities of Hudson, compares Hudson’s key features to those of competitive offerings, and summarizes why Hudson has quickly become the industry’s most widely adopted open source CI server. When continuous integration servers emerged a few years ago they found use as a means of monitoring the execution of repeated jobs. The CI server does this by identifying the developer’s changes to checked-out source code, building and testing the project, publishing the results, and communicating with members of the development team (allowing colleagues to see the build stability, analyze failure reports, and receive notifications of test failures, for example). Using a CI server has now become standard practice for many development teams, and Hudson is the open source CI server of choice for development teams of all types and sizes, worldwide. Hudson's popularity results from its being easy to install and use. It combines flexible configuration features with sophisticated capabilities such as distributed builds; it supports both Java and non-Java projects; and it is backed by the Hudson community of code contributors. More than 160 developers have contributed code, and there have already been more than 300 releases to date. According to the white paper, Hudson is the most widely adopted open source CI server in the world. The fast-growing global Hudson community has already written more than 160 plug-ins, covering everything from source code management (SCM) systems such as CVS, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Perforce, ClearCase, BitKeeper, StarTeam, and Accurev to build scripts such as Ant, Maven, shell scripts, Ruby, Groovy, and MSBuild. Hudson also supports a wide range of build wrappers, build reports, build notifiers, cluster managers, and more. Hudson clearly can be much more than a CI server. Its extensible architecture allows it to evolve beyond simple build management and serve as a very versatile development lifecycle management system — allowing developers to promote and tag builds after the fact, run workflows, track changes across dependencies, monitor and graph test results over time, track and plot code coverage and coding violations. The white paper likens Hudson to a member of the development team -- "team—a very meticulous and extremely organized colleague" -- running on a servlet container such as GlassFish with two principal responsibilities:
Sun offers a commercially supported version of Hudson, called Sun Continuous Integration Server (SCIS), which is available as part of the GlassFish Web Stack. SCIS is offered in the following options:
Open Source versions of Hudson are updated frequently, while the supported version is stable. Patches are released on the supported offering, minimizing risk to an existing running infrastructure. Customers of the Hudson support subscription also receive GlassFish Portfolio software products, including GlassFish Enterprise Server, Web Stack, and more. More Information
Sun Continuous Integration Server GlassFish WebStack Hudson pricing information
Hudson Community Web Site
[...read more...]
From the latest issue:
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Friendly
Email this article
Hudson 
"Developing Software Collaboratively with Hudson"
Copyright © 1998-2009 System News, Inc.
