Hudson - Continuous Integration made easy.. and free!

Some of you, developers, are acquainted with Continuous Integration, others do not, but one thing both have in common: the need of an easy mechanism to perform and monitor repetitive tasks in one or several projects. From building to testing, from keeping your project and dependencies versions right to logging the entire process, everything together is a task, an integration of from-development-to-deliver processes.

I didn’t know Continuous Integration itself, but everyday I have been dealing with something that resembles it. Man, it is a pain in the ass..

My employer made some colleagues of mine to use a tool - which name I can’t recall - but they keep complaining about it. So I wandered through the Web searching for something better. I found Hudson!

Hudson is a Java Web application very easy to “install”. All you have to do is to run java -jar hudson.war and there you go, point to http://localhost:8080 and you’ll have a very friendly management Web UI. Another way of running Hudson is through Java WebStart by running this file or installing it into a servlet container, like the one provided by Glassfish.

After you get it up and ready, you can start configuring you Hudson instance to match your development environment. For instance, let’s say you use:

• Maven/Ant/Nant - build tool;
• CVS/SVN/Git/Mercurial/Clearcase - SCM;
• JUnit/NUnit/Test-NG - unit-testing;
• Emma/Cobertura - code-coverage;
• Many others including Checkstyle, IRCbot or Jabber build triggers, e-mail and IM notifications and even the ability to fire-up a VMWare virtual-machine, build your project and shut it down.

Well Hudson is able to do that and much more, just check out their plug-in list! My favourite is the JIRA plug-in but unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a Bazaar plug-in and be truthfully happy.

Also it supports distributed builds and tracking dependency and release binaries versions. Isn’t it amazing? Well JBoss guys think so!

Give it a try and give me your feedback

Firefox 3 Final for Mac OS X direct link

For those of you desperately looking for a direct link, here you go! Props to Luis Miranda, the micro-blogger n00b!

Switzerland 2 - 0 Portugal

It wasn’t an important match given that Portugal has already made to the quarters, yet there’s something in this particular match that made me somewhat suffer. The referee!

I’ve been in the field for some years and if there’s something as bad as a referee’s bad judgment it’s, like in this particular case, the lack of sensitiveness for the game. Alright, it’s a sport, and as such it has rules, but we must not forget we’re not machines, and that sports are meant to provide fun. So why break all that fun and magic by taking the rules so seriously and making players act like robots?

I hate people that take sports as money as well as I hated the Switzerland - Portugal referee. It’s people like you that takes us the pleasure of living football!!

Portugal 3 - 1 Czech Republic

Portugal 2 - 0 Turkey

Israel no more!

That’s right, I’m no longer going to Israel. If you’re asking what went wrong, I can only say that higher demands came across my way! I am sad.. but not for staying, just why it happened. Dude, I know you read my blog from time to time. I just wish you the best of lucks and want to thank you for everything I learned from you.

Cya ninja

Cleaning your white MacBook with Toothpaste?

Kewl! I wonder if Apple recommends a specific toothpaste brand. Perhaps one with extra-whitening effects..

Linux, OpenSolaris and GPLv3

Hi fellow geeks,

Much curious the opinion of Linus Torvalds on Linux, OpenSolaris and GPLv3. Jonathan Schwartz’s [Sun's CEO] just answered! At least this seams an healthy discussion on very a interesting subject and not the usual bull$%&t or chairs that randomic crazy men throw in the air in these days..

Note: Schwartz has just invited Linus for dinner.

Update #1: Theo de Raadt, the OpenBSD founder and leader has just answered too!

Want to be a criminal? No? Then..

Sign here!

On April 24th, after three delays on the voting date, the European Parliament will vote on IPRED2, the Second Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive. If you’re against Software Patents and other copyright or patent environments please sign it.

I did!

Yes Mr. Ari Jaaksi, you are so very right!

From Mr. Jaaksi blog, “(…) It may be that big companies are so used to do high level standardization and high level business deals that the simple community work doesn’t seem real to them. They do not know how to deal with open source development (…)”.

Unfortunately, this is so very true! Companies tend to be more and more confident about OSS but still they seem unable to understand that its power is directly connected to something their blinded nature can’t stand, the community.

Read more at Mr. Jaaksi post. Ari Jaaksi is the “Head of Nokia’s open source software operations — including Internet Tablets and maemo.org. An adjunct professor at the Tampere University of Technology.“