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 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]

• Gadgets - Jabber Notifier, Text to Build and Hudson git clone. • Adoption: Hudson Rocks, A Home Run, vs CruiseControl, I'm in Love, Python • New article at DeveloperWorks • Reports from JavaPolis - from Kohsuke, Berte and Karsten.

Here is a recap of recent Hudson news. On the plugin front, Kohsuke reports on Plugins for .Net, including for NAnt, MSBuild, NSUnit and FxCop. It will be interesting to see if the MS community is ready for a Java-based CI tool...

I also did my usual pass to collect testimonials: • Shawn Harstock on his methodology using Fit + Groovy + Hudson, • Ben Hitchinson on a Java Continuous Integration Tool Roundup, • Robert Keith on Extreme Continuous Integration, • Paul Duvall on Continuous Integration is NOT about the CI server Hudson wins in pretty much all the references where I've seen it considered; usually with extremely positive evaluations.

Also Hudson is now a Top Java.Net, being #2 in mail traffic, #2 in CVS commits, and #8 in absolute hits. Way to go, Kohsuke!

The latest Hudson (1.122) includes what he calls the matrix project. This is a way to describe a collection of configurations through several parameters ranging over a set of values (thus, a Matrix). More details at Kohsuke's blog, at the ChangeLog and in the Wiki pages. Enjoy!

The second Hudson Extreme Feedback Device is... a Lava Lamp! :-) As Kohsuke points out (and lava lamp fans know), the shape of the lamp changes over time, so you can tell how long ago your build broke. On the plugin front, Kohsuke wrote a Gant Plugin and the community delivered 3 more: for Clover (from Stephen Connolly), a Plot Plugin (from Nigel Daley) and one for Visual SourceSafe (from Vara Kumar). Check the details and enjoy!

The plugin architecture of Hudson is paying off nicely. Jonny Wray has written one for Polarion and Michal Mocnak one for NetBeans. Read Kohsuke's blog for Additional News, and don't miss the Hudson BOF if you are attending JavaOne this year.

Another Hudson adoption: SwingLabs has Switched to Hudson from CruiseControl; its repository is available here. Some earlier adoption links are available here. One of the things that people like about Hudson is that it is quite easy to install. To make this even easier, Kohsuke has taken an idea by Tim Shadel for the 3-minute install and pushed it a bit further by making Hudson Self-executable starting with 1.81 ( download page). Enjoy!

Hudson has its first Extreme Feedback Device. Kohsuke has built an orb out from LEDs and a PIC chip and has it connected to his Hudson builds. Now that he has built one, we need to decide where to place it... Check Kohsuke's blog for complete details, he even offers you the source code and schematics; maybe there are other interesting ideas on variations of this...

Hudson, the build monitoring tool, seems to be gaining adoption very nicely. John just published a JW article evaluating 4 open source continuous integration tools and Hudson was one of them (also see his blog). Kohsuke is continuously adding features and recently has been focusing on Plugin Support, an approach that has worked very well in JAXB.

There are a number of production deployments of Hudson. GlassFish and NetBeans use it for different tasks (see here and here) and the traffic at the USER mailing list for the project is growing very rapidly. Users seem happy, as this one Switching from Anthill; his production details are worth a read, he has 400 jobs.

BTW, browsing through the list I found a 2004 article on eXtreme Feedback, a variation of Mark Weiser's Ubiquitious Computing initial work at Xerox PARC. Perhaps the time has come for things like this. It certainly would make sense to have this integrated with text messaging like SMS.

One of the Key Principles of Project GlassFish is Continuous Improvement. To do that, we need to give you stable builds of our software to use... and we need to tell you what is in them. One of the tools we use to find out what went into a build is Kohsuke's latest service: cvs-news which uses simple annotations in putback comments. Check Kohsuke's blog for details. BTW, each GlassFish build has a Highlights entry in the GlassFish Wiki. Check the Entry for GF V2 M1 and stay tuned for that for Milestone 2.

This is short notice, but, this morning (9am US Pacific time) Kohsuke will present at the latest User Experience meeting. He will be discussing his recent experiences in Tool Automation on GlassFish vs Tomcat. Please consider attending, or following up on one of the email threads on this topic. Meeting logistics and future agendas are in the User Experience Wiki Page. We are still figuring out how to make these meetings as useful and practical as possible, so constructive feedback on that would be appreciated.

Continuous Integration is gaining wider adoption; for example, check the recent Zutubi article and the TSS thread. One trend we have gone through in the GlassFish Community is a transition from Continuous Integration to Continuous Improvement. Not just do we integrate builds and functionality testing, but we are also integrating performance testing. That is the only way we can avoid Regressions.

Our main tool for continuous improvement is Hudson, and in recent releases it has acquired the notion of plug-ins, including those for Japex. The latest release of Hudson is 1.47, check Kohsuke's blog; and also see some nice words about Hudson here. As part of Transparency, we are planning to export more of the GF continuous improvement reports, like how we did with the eMail delay reports.

Added: Check Santiago's entry on the Japex Plugin.

Home Faber strikes again... Santiago describes improvements to Japex that provides Trend Reports and Kosuke talks about Hudson Plugin Support... among others to support Japex. And there is also the new Code Coverage Support in NetBeans that I mentioned this morning.

Kohsuke reports a new Hudson release that includes resolutions for a number of RFEs, some of them the result of patches contributed by the community. Hudson is used to provide continous development for many of the GlassFish Components.