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.

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

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! :-)

Georg Fleischer at Fontys University has published a Report on the Continuous Integration. The 34-page report discusses the needs from users and how different products address them and provides good material for both users and tool authors. In total 12 products are discussed, including all the usual candidates. The methodology seems reasonable, although a bit Europe-heavy. Hudson comes up very well in the comparisons and it is #2 in adoption, close behind the much older CruiseControl project.

Added - Also check Kohsuke's post on this topic, which includes a pointer to the CruiseControl downloads at Source Forge (live, snapsthot) that can be compared against Hudson's.

Kohsuke has published the first Hudson Usage Report. Plenty of good material there; some highlights... • Number of Hudson instances - 13K (anybody has any data for other CIs?) • % of Hudson's with a single machine - 87% • Most popular plugins - findbugs, warnings, checkstyle • JVM used - 65% JDK6, 32% JDK5 • Top OS used - Windows, Linux, Solaris

We want to learn more about the current use of Hudson to plan the future roadmap; this automated survey is just one of several ways to collect this information.

Uncle Bob is one of the grand names in Agile Development... and he is also now a Hudson fan -see the comments and his Screencast (thanks to Eric for the tip). Another fan is James Governor (from RedMonk); check his addendum on Hudson at the end of his Advice to Sun; he also reports that Dan @ Adobe is another fan.

And still more fans... check this Snapshot of a Whiteboard taken by Alexis earlier this week - Hudson is the #1 choice. Nice!

Are you a fan too? If so, vote for Hudson at the SOA Readers' Choice - as of right now Rational Functional Tester is #1 (see here for some background to how this happened).

I think Tim's was the First Post with (free) advice on the direction that Sun should take, but many others have followed since; enough that Dave decided to track them via a Delicious Tag. No consensus in the recommendations but quite a few mention GlassFish (most on the positive, but some negative, but the spelling is right) - and James Governor even makes an special mention of Hudson. In general, GlassFish seems to have benefit quite a bit from extra attention (and the global financial squeeze) in the last few weeks; check out the google search trend: snapshot, live.

Interesting times indeed! (regardless of whether that is a Chinese Curse).

My last Hudson roundup was back in May (hudson+adoption). Adoption continues to be very strong, and there are plenty of interesting links, although I didn't try to catch up with all the backlog.

It's been a while since my last Hudson Adoption roundup, so this is longer than usual:

• Notes from JavaOne - Duke Award, Rama, Kohsuke, TS, Audience • New Plugins - Crap4J, Ivy (full list; Tutorial, Part 6) • Presentations - No Fluff just Stuff, Ireland CI (June 10th). • Comparisons - W/ CruiseControl • Adoption in France - Overview, Developpez, Valtech, Xebia, Octo • Kind Words: Geir, Why Aren't You? • Doing More w/ Hudson - Gant, Multiple Grails?, Maven Overlays • Adoption in Scandinavia - Sweden (.NET projects), Finland

This made me smile: Hudson got a free CVS to SVN conversion from CollabNet because they were using it themselves! I think that's quite nice from CollabNet. Check out Kohsuke's note for the mail thread and details.

Hudson was an easy "Número Uno" in a recent CI Poll. The top three vote getters were:

• Hudson - 78 • Continuum - 55 • CruiseControl - 31

Totally unscientific, but still the gap is large enough to suggest large adoption. Anecdotally, I keep bumping into Hudson use at Sun (and MySQL) customers. And the download numbers keep growing.

Some more News and Adoption Roundup:

• Progress with I18N
• Hudson destined to Distros: FreeBSD and OpenSUSE and OpenSolaris
• More Projects Using Hudson - GlassFish SailFin, Apache Jackrabbit
• A System Tray for Hudson
• Voice Control with Hudson and Using Variables to Identify Builds
• Kind Words - Nice!, Awesome!, Groovy!
• Writing a Plug-In, a multi-part series: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6-tbd] and [7-tbd]

Ohloh.Net (info) is a very interesting social network site. It tracks contributions, ratings and use of open source components, in isolation and in stacks. As of now (Feb 7, 2008) below is the data for GlassFish and a few other app servers. Based on this, unscientific, data, quality is doing very well and adoption is increasing but still quite to go before passing Apache Tomcat... or getting even close to MySQL (1357 stacks, 4.1/5 rating)!

• GlassFish (55 stacks, 4.8/5 rating) • Geronimo (15, 3.5/5) • JBoss (88, 3.9/5) • Tomcat (339, 4.3/5)

In a separate space, Hudson has almost surpased CruiseControl, which is very good. I was telling Kohsuke he should try to get Hudson into OpenSolaris and the Linux distros - it clearly is the best tool in this space and will be a huge winner:

• Hudson (41, 4.8/5)
• CruiseControl (44, 4.3/5)
• Continuum (23, 4.4/5)

If you are using GlassFish or Hudson, please considering stacking them!

GlassFish and Hudson.

Quick roundup on Hudson news:

• Kohsuke is looking for an IPS maintainer. • Hudson and... Grails, JRuby and Cobertura. • Presentation at FOSDEM - Blog and interview • Kind words - Hudson Rocks, Hudson Love, More Love (and some gripes).

"Great tool for your continuous integration needs", "pretty simple and works like a charm" and "truly a sweet tool" are phrases commonly associated with Hudson. This time they are coming from JRuby / Ruby community. This post describes how to setup Hudson for running your Ruby and JRuby tests. The post describes a gem CI:Reporter that formats the test results in XML format that can then be easily consumed by Hudson.

And if you want to show your support for Hudson, go visit the CafePress Store.