Top 10 features of Hudson

Kohsuke (aka Mr. Hudson) and I attended The Server Side Java Symposium, Las Vegas in Mar 2008. In one of the evenings we spent togehter, I decided to pick Kohsuke's brain on top 10 features of Hudson. My notes were lost but luckily I found them so this article is slightly dated but most of the content is still very much valid. Newer features have been added since then anyway.

Here you go ...

1. Ease of
   installation & use - Hudson is downloaded as a single
   WAR and run just using "java -jar hudson.war" - no additional
   configuration or container. It can also be started by clicking on this link.
   There has been emphasis on a single web app with no need to run a
   Continuous Integration (CI) server or client. If started using "java
   -jar hudson.war", then the default page looks like:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   More details about ease of installation & use are available in Hudson
   Docs.


2. Fairly
   extensive ecosystem of plugins
   - You can easily write plugins to support tools/processes in your team.
   And after you contribute, they can be used by others as well.




1. Update
   Center - for finding and installing plugins


2. Source Code Control Plugins: Visual
   Source Safe, Git,
   Perforce
   and many
   others.


3. Most of the plugins are small and can be created in spare
   time.


4. Maven
   support for generating plugin templates. Read more about
   developing plugins in Extend
   Hudson.




3. Distributed
   build support - This lets you use those empty sitting
   machines in a master/slave configuration and churn out the builds.
   Hudson "baby sits" the slave and performs some non-trivial work to
   monitor it such as clock synchronization, disk space monitoring and
   restarting the slave if it gets disconnected.


4. Inter team
   support - Multiple teams working together with an
   inter-dependency require downstream
   projects to be automatically built. A complete chain of projects with
   upstream/downstream can be easily configured. Such projects also need
   to keep track of which version of this is used by which version of
   that. Hudson uses Finger
   printing to simplify this.


5. Open source
   - Hudson is fully open-sourced under the MIT
   License.


6. Maturity
   - 226th release was released on 6/17 and never lost data compatbility
   even once. The migration from older to newer version is seamless, it's
   basically just redeploying the WAR and there is no extra configuration
   required.


7. Extensive
   tools outside Hudson - This is possible because of
   programmable control interface. Some of the examples are:




1. Hudson
   Tracker & Tray
   Application - Small application that sits in your task tray
   and monitor Hudson builds


2. Trac
   plugin - Creates links from Hudson projects to Trac instances.


3. Firefox
   Build Monitor plugin - Displays Hudson orbs on Firefox status
   bar panel to indicate the build status




8. Permalink
   support - Hudson provides easily readable URLs for most of
   the pages such as "last successful build", "promoted build". These URLs
   can be used linked from anywhere.


9. Localization
   - Localization is available in English, Japanese, Gemany, French,
   Turkish, Brazilian, Portugese, Russian. You can easily create your own
   localization bundle by following these
   instructions. There is even an IntelliJ
   plugin to internationalize existing code.


10. Building
    blocks - Hudson builds on general-purpose building blocks
    which can be used for other projects as well:




1. Stapler
   -




1. URL binding of domain objects


2. JSON & XML generation


3. Much of the implementation of remoting is in Stapler -
   take POJO and convert into XML


4. IntelliJ plugin for Stapler


5. View tier is pluggable - Hudson uses Jelly.




2. Remote
   Access API


3. Localizer
   - small runtime library to choose the locale with
   IDE plugin for i18n

So you still think you need another Continuous Integration tool ?



Download
Hudson now!



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