Sunday, January 1, 2012

Hudson (For java geeks)

While searching for a java program like ccache and distcc i found this project that includes the features included in both ccache and distcc and much more features.

Note: Distcc is a program that distribute builds of C/C++ across several machines on a network, while ccache acts as a cache pre-processor to C/C++ compilers, which results in 5 to 10 times speedup in common compilations.

Agenda
  • Introduction
  • Hudson features
  • Hudson best practices
  • Hudson eclipse plugin
  • How to contribute?
  • References
Introduction

Hudson monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron. Among those things, current Hudson focuses on the following two jobs:

Building/testing software projects continuously, Hudson provides an easy-to-use so-called continuous integration system, making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project, and making it easier for users to obtain a fresh build. The automated, continuous build increases the productivity. 

Monitoring executions of externally-run jobs, such as cron jobs and procmail jobs, even those that are run on a remote machine. For example, with cron, all you receive is regular e-mails that capture the output, and it is up to you to look at them diligently and notice when it broke. Hudson keeps those outputs and makes it easy for you to notice when something is wrong.


Hudson features

Hudson offers the following features and much more:
  •  Change set support: Hudson can be configured entirely from its friendly web GUI with extensive on-the-fly error checks and inline help. There's no need to tweak XML manually anymore, although if you'd like to do so, you can do that, too.
  •  Permanent links: Hudson gives you clean readable URLs for most of its pages, including some permalinks like "latest build"/"latest successful build", so that they can be easily linked from elsewhere.
  • RSS/E-mail/IM Integration: Monitor build results by RSS or e-mail to get real-time notifications on failures. 
  • After-the-fact tagging: Builds can be tagged long after builds are completed 
  • Distributed builds: Hudson can distribute build/test loads to multiple computers. This lets you get the most out of those idle workstations sitting beneath developers' desks. 
  • File fingerprinting: Hudson can keep track of which build produced which jars, and which build is using which version of jars, and so on. This works even for jars that are produced outside Hudson, and is ideal for projects to track dependency. 
  • Easy installation: Just java -jar hudson.war for testing. Use a native package or deploy it in a servlet container for production use. No additional install, no database.
  • Easy configuration: Hudson can be configured entirely from its friendly web GUI with extensive on-the-fly error checks and inline help. There's no need to tweak XML manually anymore, although if you'd like to do so, you can do that, too. 
Hudson best practices 

Continuous integration with automated test execution has seen board adoption in recent years. The ideas behind continuous integration have been changed how companies look at Build Management, Release Management, Deployment Automation, and Test Orchestration. This section provides a set of best practices for Hudson - A Continuous integration to provide executives, business managers, software developers and architects a better sense of the development progress and code quality of projects throughout the development lifecycle. (View Hudson Best Practices)

Hudson eclipse plugin 

Hudson integrates with Netbeans, Eclipse, and many other IDEs and tools, check this link for a list of tools integrates with hudson.

Install using the Update Manager or drop dk.contix.eclipse.hudson_x.x.x.jar in the plugins/ dir.
The update site url is URL.
 
After installation, the plugin must be configured. This is done in Preferences under Hudson. The important parameter is Hudson base url, which should point to the main Hudson page.

When the plugin is running, a health icon is displayed at the bottom of the Eclipse window. The icon is red on build failure and green on success. Double-click on the icon to open the Hudson view, where all projects in Hudson can be tracked. Please note that due to limitations in Eclipse, the Hudson view must be active before the icon is displayed. 

How to contribute? 

Check out this page.

References 

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