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 just added Maven 2 support to Hudson 1.78 (see announcement, Download, changelog). Hudson provides continuous build and monitoring, and includes many useful features including Distributed builds, RSS/Email notification, File fingerprinting, JUnit support and Plugin Support.

Hudson can run on a number of Java containers, including Tomcat and GlassFish. Some instructions to run on GlassFish are at this Article at DevelopInJava. To run with Security enabled Requires Additional Instructions.

The GlassFish team at sun uses Hudson for most of its builds, but the adoption outside of GlassFish continues to improve; check these testimonials:

•  Glenn Smith switched from anthill; check his experiences here.
•  Tim Shadel switched from CruiseControl after trying also Continuum. He has a 3-minute install on Winstone.
•  Lars (at Mindquarry) switched from CruiseControl. Check their Hudson Dashboard and their blogs.
•  Also check the earlier blog by Fabrizio on Setting Hudson with NetBeans.

I think that Hudson is clearly very useful and we need to advertise it a bit more; I'll try to get something going.

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.