Pro/Con Continuous Integration Systems

Question

Duplicate of: Continuous Integration Servers

---

Hi,

Recently i've looked into several CIS and read a lot of articles about them. I'm kinda impressed by Hudson, because it is so easy to set up. I like to start a discussion about several CIS like CC, Bamboo, Continuum etc. It would be nice if some experienced users could tell me about difficulties of some CIS or positive things. I for example had no problems setting up Hudson. Cruise Control seemd kinda messy but still i got it working too. I had more problems when i tried to build a project with bamboo or continuum. Of course i just scratched on the surface of each of those systems so i hope i get some useful informations.

thanks

kukudas

Answer 1

At my work we use Hudson and here's some of the points I like about it:

• Good amount of useful plugins like integrated Checkstyle, FindBugs, Cobertura and so on - heck, we even put Continuous Integration Game to our Hudson!
• Runs Ant scripts, for us this means we can use our custom Ant scripts which we use to build our entire app to make Hudson first check CVS for changes, if any present then build the actual app, then run the project's unit tests and if any of these phases fails, Hudson marks the build as failed and spams several emails to everyone and their mother about how evil this one person who commited these specific changes to CVS is because he broke the build :)

And then some things I don't like:

• No way to mass manage build results. We recently had to remove about 300 builds by hand from build history because there wasn't a tool for it. That's 4 clicks per build so it took a bit of time.
• Web UI gets slow rather fast for some reason and some plugins eat a lot of memory.

Answer 2

Hudson is my favorite, although I admit I've only worked with it and Cruise Control.

Hudson Pros:

• GUI configuration is really easy and Help snippets are provided in the config pages themselves.
• Many Plugins, many of which are suited for Java development. Plus, you can write your own.
• The project releases new versions often, so bug fixes and improvements get released frequently.

Hudson Cons:

• Doesn't currently handle the ability to run different build tasks on different schedules within the same project. This is really my only grief with the application. It'd be nice to be able to run ant foo on an SCM poll trigger and ant bar nightly within the same project.