Project page: https://hudson.dev.java.net/
What do people like?
- Speed and ease of setup
- Focus
- Ability to watch console output during a build
- No XML
- Building multiple branches
- Build history graph
Key differentiators (according to Hudson)
- Easy installation
- Easy configuration
- Change set support
- Permanent links to "latest build"/"latest successful build"
- RSS/E-mail Integration
- After-the-fact tagging
- JUnit/TestNG test reporting
- Distributed builds
- File fingerprinting
- Plugin Support
References
I just now downloaded and deployed hudson.war in my Tomcat 5 container. And I have to say that this is way better than CruiseControl, at least the CruiseControl that I tried several years ago.
– "Ah, Hudson", Weiqi Gao's Observations, 15 February 2007
I created a test install of hudson for a Jira plugin I'm working on at home at the moment. Once I figured out how to make the war file deploy in Winstone it took me literally a minute to setup my build via svn and maven in hudson. (I couldn't get the hudson war to deploy directly as in Tim's post but had to create a webapps dir and point winstone at that.) Try setting up a project that quickly in cruisecontrol.
– "Hudson Continuous Builds", Software, Process and other stuff, 10 February 2007
It's just so easy to turn on, that it seems like a no brainer.
– "Try Hudson Instead of CruiseControl: The 3 Minute Setup", Zdot, 8 February 2007
"It's true that Hudson does lack some of the more complex features of older automated build tools, such as the ability to work with obscure SCM tools or the ability to send build status updates via IRC. Perhaps more importantly, it's thoughtfully designed and very easy to use."
– Automated Builds Made Easy With Hudson, OCI Java News Brief, December 2006
Hudson is terrific. It's just so...so...simple. Elegant, even. Does one thing and does it well. Absolutely levels CruiseControl in terms of understanding what its users want to do.
– "Hudson is fantastic", Laird Nelson's Weblog, 22 Nov 2006
Comments
Kohsuke Kawaguchi seems like a busy guy:
Hudson now self-executable:
This caught my eye because it seems they've done what I (Jtf) proposed doing with CC – moving the build loop to be a webapp (see mainAsWar in the contrib directory) so you could have the choice of just deploying a war or of running it as an executable.
Hudson reminds me (Jtf) of how we used to compare CC to AntHill or other build management tools, in that we did fewer things and did them well.
Some of the stated benefits of Hudson (e.g., No more "full rebuild" before a commit, No more running tests locally) concern me but from what I can tell, the actual implementation fits fine with, shall we say, a correct Continuous Integration mindset. – Jason Yip
