CI Cage Fight - Hudson
• Julian Simpson
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS33KxXpXYQ&hl=en&fs=1]
The next installment in this series is Eric Lefevre presenting Hudson. Hudson is an open source CI server that has gained a fantastic amount of ground in the past year or two. Out of the box it has a pretty good feature set:
- Distributed builds. You can declare a dependency on a particular OS and Hudson will route the build to an agent that satisfies that dependency
- Very good interface (that damned butler!) with a nifty weather metaphor for build status.
- Localised in 8 languages
- GUI based configuration
- You can declare an entire matrix of different builds and let Hudson work out the details. (Fitnesse build on Windows, Fitnesse build on Unix, coming right away sir)
- Plugin-friendly architecture and a pretty good community of plugin developers - very smart move
There's a load of other features at the Hudson website. What I didn't note down is that it's amazingly simple to get started with. I hope it raises the bar for CI servers, commercial or not.