Eclipse Releases Open Source Hudson 3.0 – What About Jenkins?

From the ‘fork that time hasn’t forgotten’ files:

In the world of Continuous Integration (CI) servers, more often than not I only hear one name and it’s not Hudson. The name I usually hear is Jenkins, the fork of the formerly Oracle project, now Eclipse project called Hudson.

While they hype cycles that I follow are almost exclusively talking about Jenkins, Hudson is still active and today the Hudson 3.0 release debuted, (well at least the official press release from the Eclipse Foundation did – the actual Hudson 3.0 release came out at the end of December).

W”ith a strong and engaged ecosystem, Hudson continues to thrive, and Oracle’s goal in moving the project to the Eclipse Foundation has expanded this even further,” said Chris Tonas, vice president, Application Development Tools, Oracle in a statement “Hudson 3.0 adds key capabilities that make continuous integration easier than ever to implement and manage while enhancing the overall environment for developers.”

Oracle officially ‘donated’ Hudson to Eclipse in May of 2011and to be honest, that’s the last time I’ve heard about Hudson before today. Apparently there are some 30,000 plus installations of Hudson out there and the new 3.0 release could help to accelerate that.

The new features include a small footprint that has been reduced by 50 percent – now that’s a lot of bloat. A simplified installation process is also key feature, making it easier for new installations. Overall the look and feel of the web interface has also been improved.

I suspect that by the very nature of the Eclipse release train and the highly integrated nature of Eclipse project that Hudson will continue to do well as an Eclipse project, even if journalist like me don’t hear about it.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.