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

NetBeans 6.7 is now available for download. The site includes their usual screencasts (see specially the Overview) and Tutorials. The new features I find most interesting are the Connected Developer and the Build Tool support (including Hudson and Maven). Other features include support for more Dynamic Languages, Java Desktop/Swing and Web and Java EE; bundled JavaEE 6 and JavaFX 1.2 will be in later releases. Related entries tagged netbeans

Not exactly the Antipodes but I think we can argue we have the whole world covered... While FISL is hosted in Porto Alegre, Jazoon will be held in Zurich. Check out the Jazoon Home Page and Schedule and check Alexis' List of Talks related to GlassFish. And, if you are on the other side, check GlassFish @FISL!

The 10th FISL starts this week. Like previous years, it looks like a lot of fun: the Program is full of good content, and there is also Porto Alegre... FISL starts on the 24th and it is preceded by Javali, an event focused on Java, on the 23rd (Agenda).

I did a quick pass through the FISL program to highlight some sessions, including those related to GlassFish Projects and friends:

• Arun on GF, MySQL and NetBeans (S205) (Arun's note)
• Mauricio on OSGi in GFv3 (S736)
• Ludo will talk about OpenDS (S473) (Ludo's note)
• Fabiane on Hudson (S733)
• Pat on OpenSSO (S360) (Pat's note)
• Fabio Veloso on Jersey (S282)

Other talks related to GlassFish include

• On OpenJDK, Bruno (S734) and Charlie (S226)
• On OpenSolaris Rafael (S600) and Brian (S749)
• On NetBeans et al, Geertjan (S735), and
• On OSS, Simon (S757),

I wish I was there! If you attend FISL or Javali, please report back.

The Release Candidate 3 for NetBeans 6.7 is now available and so are several posts highlighting some of its new features. Check out: • Petr on Hudson Support, • Geertjan on Maven Support, and • Octavian on Subversion Support Check out previous entries tagged NetBeans for highlights on other features like the Connected Developer (and Kenai), more scripting support, and how to use NB 6.7 with GlassFish v3.

Somehow this one popped into my head:

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
(...from A Visit from St. Nicholas)

Replace Christmas with JavaOne, and the "not stirring" with "releasing furiously"... and there we are :-)

Three major releases today: GFv3 Preview, OpenSolaris 2009.6 and NetBeans 6.7 RC1. NetBeans 6.7 comes with Connected Developer features like integration with Project Kenai and integration with Bugzilla, native Maven support, out-of-the box Grails 1.1 support, support for Hudson and easy integration with GlassFish v3 Preview. More details in the RC1 Info page, the New and Noteworthy page and the Download page. Also see the blogs by SDNNews and James.

And, if you are at JavaOne, check out TS5055 and Bob's technical keynote tomorrow afternoon.

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

NetBeans 6.7 Beta is Now Available. I'll highlight two of the Many Features: Kenai Integration and Hudson Integration. The first one continues to flesh out the story of the Connected Developer; the second is yet another example of Hudson Adoption. Check out the Home Page, the Release Notes or go and just Download it!

The connected developer story is beginning to look pretty good; I'll come back to it after I find time to write a few background posts needed to provide context for the story.

Added - Also see JAG's post on the topic.

The registration for our CommunityOne Unconferences is now open. We are hosting two intertwined events, one for all the GlassFish projects, the other for OpenSSO, OpenDS et al. Both in Hall A at the Moscone (Wikipedia, GeoHack) the Sunday before JavaOne, May 31st. Both events are free, and you can switch back and forth as your interests apply. Check the GlassFish Unconference page and the OpenSSO Day MeetUp and Topics page.

The unconferences will be followed with a Party at the Thirsty Bear. We have plenty of space at the Moscone but the TB space is limited, so I encourage you to sign up early.

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.

Kohsuke has added several OS-specific features to Hudson, including authentication on Unix using the OS-specific identity/groups and remote Windows slave management. Hudson can also now switch its workspace to a ZFS file system. ZFS support is a precursor to additional features like better backups and faster clean builds and matrix builds. It will be interesting to see whether these features increase noticeably the market share of Solaris and OpenSolaris as Hudson platforms. More details in Kohsuke's note.

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.