Now the time has come to look to the future for Hudson. To guide our work on the Hudson project, we want to understand how you’re using Hudson and what you might need going forward.
Take a few minutes to fill out the Hudson community survey. To thank you for your time, survey respondents will be entered in a draw to win a 16GB 3G/WiFi Apple iPad.
We believe that Hudson users can look forward to a long, bright future.
Working with the community, Oracle and Sonatype are each putting a number of full-time engineering resources on Hudson. The Hudson lead, Winston Prakash from Oracle, is highly skilled, very thoughtful, and he cares about the community. He is also the first person to create detailed, comprehensive architectural documentation.
This kind of documentation (which has never been available in the past) is required to understand how Hudson can be improved. The lack of architectural documentation, along with how decisions were made, left the Hudson community mostly dependent on a single individual for core changes. Let’s be honest about where this led: Continue reading
Sonatype’s perspective regarding the Hudson Project is pretty simple: we have been and will continue to be committed to advancing Hudson and making better software available to the community of Hudson users.
Very recently, Sonatype completed significant development in the evolution of Hudson’s core architecture. The benefits of these changes include better leveraging of industry standards, increased performance and stability, and tight integration with Maven 3 that provides greater visibility into running builds. We are continuing to add engineers to our Hudson team and are working hard with the Hudson community to move much of the work we’ve done here to Java.net.
Our work on Hudson is consistent with Sonatype’s long history of investment and community support. Our work with Maven at the Apache Software Foundation, with m2eclipse at the Eclipse Foundation, and with Nexus (our open source repository manager) all underscore our commitment to innovation for open source and commercial users alike.
Are we a commercial enterprise? Absolutely. However, our track record of open source innovation and community contribution speaks for itself. At Sonatype, we’ve always focused on the code, and that’s where we’re focused today with Hudson.
When should the code be tagged? How is the release/branch/tag process related to deployment? How should we branch during the release process? Should we branch early on in the release? Or, should we just continue on in trunk and only branch when we need to start parallel development? Who performs the release and from what machine? Do we run this plugin from Hudson?
This is a sample of some of the questions I’ve been asked by customers over the past few years, and, believe it or not, my answers are always a little less than satisfying. My stock answer to one of these questions is along the lines of: Well, Maven has a certain set of opinions about how you should manage releases, but it isn’t set in stone and there are as many variations in a project’s release process as there are corporations that code Java.
What we call “The Release Process” is seldom simply a technology problem and more than often involves process, organizational structure, and definitions of responsibilities. These are the intangibles that lead to the reality: everyone’s “Release Process” tends to be unique, especially as your projects become more important and more complex.
The Sonatype-enhanced distribution of Hudson included in the Sonatype Professional suite is designed to meet the demands of mission-critical software development. Sign up today for Sonatype’s upcoming webinar on Hudson Continuous Integration with Sonatype Professional.
Register for this webinar to learn how Sonatype Professional empowers teams to realize the promise of agile development through continuous integration, while reducing project risk. Sonatype webinars are free to attend, but you will need to sign up to reserve your spot.
