The adoption of Hudson continues to grow and we are also beginning to see movement in Sun's commercial offering.

Kohsuke's Hudson Feed has many examples of adoption. The community is very active and recent posts include A Campfire Plugin and a CMake Plugin, a spanish Tutorial on SVN and Hudson and Using Hudson with Rational Team Concert (from the official IBM site!). Two posts with nice, quotable compliments are:

• From Grant Smith's Creating a Continuous Integration Server for Java Projects Using Hudson at Wazi: our conclusion - based on a combination of first-hand experience and other people's opinions - is that Hudson is the current front-runner among open source CI engines. • From Joe Heck: Hudson - A lot of things done right: check out Hudson. It's a quick check - one download, one command-line, and you are rolling.

Three examples on the commercial side, all from today:

• We closed another customer for Sun's Hudson Support; nice! Just let us know if you have any questions.

• We also got email from one of Sun's Principal Field Engineers. He is overseas visiting a (very) large customer where he found wide use of Hudson and strong interest in improved support. We not even knew this company was using Hudson - strike another win for Open Source!

• And, our friends at Sun's Inner Circle - Sun's newsletter for CIOs - included an article on Hudson in the Nov/Dec issue.

Kohsuke's Webinar on Hudson last week was a success; it was very well attended and had Great Reviews, and it is now Available for Replay (free, but requires registration). If you are interested in the topic, also check the Hudson Whitepaper. And, if you want to move beyond that, Sun offers Hudson support as part of the GlassFish Portfolio offering - see Summary of Offering.

A reminder that Kohsuke will be presenting our first Hudson webinar tomorrow, October 14th, at 10:00 am PDT / 1:00 pm EDT / 19.00 CET. The webinar is free but Registration is Required. Kohsuke also authored the recently published Hudson Whitepaper.

The registration for the Hudson webinar on October 14th is now open: Title - Blueprints for Deploying a Software Project on Hudson Date - Wed, Oct 14, 2009 Time - 10:00 am PDT / 1:00 pm EDT / 19.00 CET Presenter - Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Sun Microsystems Registration - Link

Also, check out the Developing Software Collaboratively with Hudson white paper.

See our GlassFish Events Calendar for this and other events.

We have published a new WhitePaper on Hudson: Developing Software Collaboratively with Hudson, like the rest of the GlassFish Portfolio WPs it requires (free) SDN registration. The WP provides a good overview of Hudson and Sun's commercial distribution: Sun CI Server (summary), which is part of the GlassFish Portfolio. Check it out and let us know what you think. And, on a separate but related topic, Kohsuke just came back from Presenting at JavaZone and it seems it went very well. The recordings are now available and they look very good - see the Full List, the encodings in Silverlight and MP4.

Kohsuke and I have been hinting at this for a while (and we pre-announced it at JavaOne) and now it is official: reflecting the continued growth of Hudson Adoption, Sun now provides Commercial Support for Hudson. Formally speaking, the offer is part of the Recently Announced WebStack 1.5 and you buy it via the GlassFish Portfolio Offering. In a nutshell, we are providing sustaining support, with priority treatment for bug fixes filed by customers. We also can provide consultative support for people interested in, say, creating private plugins or improving their internal Agile processes. Kohsuke has collected all the key pointers into this Summary Page.

Additional links include the Features in the Offer, Terms of Support (bottom of main page) and Service-Level Agreement (bottom of main page). As always, we appreciate your feedback to help us continue to improve Hudson and Sun's offerings.

Added - Reports from the web:

• Our team in Hungary

July is usually a slow month but instead was a record month for USERS@Hudson. Part of this is Hudson, part of this is that the whole space of CI and ALM seems to be growing. Below are some recent additional links in this area, biased towards Hudson. Sun just released a commercial support for Hudson (within the GF WebStack) - I'll do a longer post tomorrow.

• From Sonatype, work on a Maven+Nexus+Hudson Image for EC2; Also looking for 3 FTE for Hudson.
• From the Sonar folks, a Plugin for Hudson; see John's note and the link at Sonar's Support Page.
• IBM products on Measured Capability Improvement Framework (!) and Cloud Computing for Developers.
• CollabNet's ALM product, TeamForge, uses Hudson. See Features and Agile Support.
• Atlassian seems interested in Software as Service.
• Oracle has some ALM Products (@Oracle, @eWeek). I'm sure we will learn more about them :-)
• New Hudson articles: Intro@SolitaryGeek and at DevX.

Added - Hudson is mentioned very positively in Andrew Binstock's SDTimes article: Integration Watch: The quickly changing market for continuous integration . Also check Julian Simpson's Commentary and Analysis on the same topic.

Kohsuke has been expanding the capabilities of Hudson over the last few months to make it easier to manage and provision more machines (Swarm of Machines, EC2 Plugin, PXE Plugin) and then do interesting things on it (Selenium Grid, Hadoop Cluster). The latest addition includes a distributed fork Plugin that provides a CLI functionality similar to SSH and an companion language binding to Java and Groovy. Kohuke's intention is to simplify writing distributed builds that then can be executed across the machines managed by Hudson. Check out the details in Kohsuke's writeup and in the Wiki page.

Hudson fans no longer have to be envious of POssO (the portable administration console for OpenSSO) or of Zen (the OpenDS variant); now you can also show-off your iPhone through the Hudson Helper for iPhone - see it in action Building Galileo. Not content with just that, David also ported the Hudson Helper To Android! Me thinks somebody should do a good JavaFX version... then you could run it in your TV!!

Hudson continues to show very nice growth; This post reports on three different indicators.

Seiji Sogabe recently did an analysis of the addition of new Hudson plugins, and the pace is accelerating: there were 55 new plugins in 2008, while half-way through 2009 we already are up to 44. Seiji represented this new created a chart to show this graphically in a chart, also shown to the left. See Kohsuke's post for an english version of Seiji's note.

The number of job offerings at Indeed.com where Hudson is listed is also growing. Unfortunately, "Hudson" is too common a term to search on it, so I approximated the growth trend by adding "Continuous" and "Integration"; the result is here. As a reference, I compared the growth with CruiseControl, using relative and absolute metrics. The results (absolute and relative) shows that CruiseControl has flattened while Hudson is growing.

Counting the actual number of jobs is harder, but an approximation suggests that CruiseControl still has more entries than Hudson, but not by much - see trend comparison, CC jobs (121) and Hudson jobs (97).

Finally, Kohsuke also reports on Adoption at Eclipse, where Hudson was the #1 CI tool, ahead of CruiseControl and Bamboo.

More Adoption indicators tagged Hudson+Adoption

Kohsuke has been releasing additional Hudson features in preparation for his JavaOne Presentations. The latest additions are a new EC2 Plugin, support for Selenium Grid and the ability to easily enlist a Swarm of Computers to leverage sub-utilized desktops. The swarm approach seems a good way to leverage the isolation provided by VirtualBox (see last week's Webinar) to convince your co-workers to donate spare cycles.

Many years ago, one would write a program by punching a Card Deck on your Puncher, submitting it (with a rubber band) and then getting back a printout... Then we went through Teletypes, CRTs, Workstations and today's Laptops. So, how does the future look like? I like a hybrid solution where we use our "local" computation device(s) and also services "on the cloud" that expand, complement, or just interact with one or more local devices and/or agents. Kenai is already providing some of those services; Kohsuke just posted a note pointing to a service that does Automatic Continuous Integration for Grails projects on Google Code.

Two weeks ago Hudson reached release 1.300 (yep, three hundred releases, and the latest is already 1.303!) and Kohsuke wrote a short Commemoration Post summarizing some of the accomplishments. By all metrics the project is doing very well: I'll argue that Hudson is now the leading CI tool, the traffic on USERS@Hudson is over 1200/month and the project is very well grounded in the community with over 140 committers.

As adoption continues to grow, Kohsuke is adjusting the community releases to increase stability and we are working to deliver supported releases and other features from Sun soon. And, all along, the number of plugins and features will continue to grow, including a new CLI features that can be used to Provide a Groovy Shell.

So, here is a toast to Kohsuke's baby, may it Live Long and Prosper, may it continue to grow and reach many more releases and users. And we hope to see you all at the UnConference, and at CommunityOne and JavaOne

What is the connection between OpenGrok, Drizzle and Bazaar? Hudson, the Continuous Integration system. Check out Jorgen's writeup describing his Presentation on using Hudson with OpenGrok, and Trond's note on Bazaar Plugin, used with Drizzle Builds. Another connection is that Trond and Jorgen work in Sun's DataBase group in Trondheim, and you might think that is how they discovered Hudson, except that in a large, distributed, company, Open Source products often get adopted without any direct internal communication. Actually, in an internal recent presentation on Drizzle Brian was telling me about this great CI tool called Hudson! :-)

Today, at CommunityOne East, Sun will announce more of its Cloud Initiative so it is appropriate to highlight Kohsuke's recent announcement on Hadoop, the Java-based Apache project that provides a framework for distributed data-intensive computation (Website, Wikipedia, NYTimes article).

In a nutshell, Kohsuke has added a new Hudson Plugin that can turn a Hudson cluster into a Hadoop cluster. Hudson is very easy to install and provisioning and Kohsuke is considering several extensions already, so this seems an interesting direction. Details at KK's writeup.