Improving engineering process with Hudson

BANGALORE, INDIA: Glassfish Evangelist Arun Gupta was in full swing when he went about exploring the possibility of improving engineering process with Hudson at Spark IT 2010 here on Thursday. Hudson is an open source CI (continuous integration) server, which is easy to install and use with architecture extensibility.

Gupta informed that there were more than 230 community contributors of plug-ins, source code and de-bugs for Hudson. It is estimated to have 13,000 installations. MYSQL, Ebay, JBOSS, Yahoo, LinkedIn are some big names that use Hudson.

According to Gupta, Hudson comes with a lot of advantages.

“While you are creating a code and start making changes, Hudson quickly notices them, integrates, checks out the source code and gives build command. Apart from running tests and publishing it, it features an excessive integration with tools. Hudson also provides feedbacks by sending alerts on broken Builds through IMs, email, RSS feeds, tray application or pop ups to notify developers,” he pointed out.

Hudson can identify broken builds within five minutes. It automatically finds regression and notifies only when the tests are failing. This helps manage people’s attention effectively. It can run tests on different configuration but the results are aggregated. It also enables cross-project dependency. One can execute test separately and correlated Builds. It has a concept to mark the build as promoted, based on the test outcome.