Kohsuke Kawaguchi's Blog

I'll be spending more time on Hudson going forward

Hudson started several years ago as my hobby project, yet over the time it has really grown in terms of popularity. Now it's one of the most active projects on java.net with users all over the world. Unfortunately, this being a hobby means I still had day job responsibilities like JAXB, Metro, and GlassFish v3, so I had to work on Hudson weekends and in the night.

Well, I'm happy to report that I don't have to do that any more — Hudson is now my day job, and I'll also have some flexibility to work on some other tools in the simliar space as Hudson (and some are actually already in the works, so stay tuned!)

With this shift, I plan to finally implement some of the long-standing big features, as well as fix more bugs in more timely fashion. For example, Stephen and I are already working on enabling virtual machines to be used as build slaves (so that you don't have to install test environment to each machine individually.) I also already started working on making plugin installations much simpler, just like you do from IDEs.

Beyond that, nowadays I think of Hudson as a foundation for doing all kinds of automation in software development, not just doing builds and tests, and I think this is an emerging problem space that Hudson should be solving. Imagine the world, for example, where a developer can commit a change without running a test at all, and just let a system like Hudson progressively exposes it to more serious testing as well as integrating with other people's changes, all the way down to its deployment. Imagine if you can track which stage of this pipeline your particular change is, and correlate regressions with exact set of changes. Imagine you have a test failure in a long test — what if Hudson runs the test up to the failing test, then notify you and let you attach a debugger to this running instance, so that you don't have to take steps to reproduce the problem on your local system any more? I think those are all possible.

The only sad thing about this change is that most likely I will continue to hack on Hudson in evening and weekends anyway. There are just so much that can be done, yet the life is so short...

Comments

• Congratulations from a happy Hudson user. :)

  It would certainly be nice to see Hudson evolve into an automation and integration tool for all stages of development, from builds and tests to deployment and debugging.

  I will be following the proposed evolution with interest.

  Ismael

  Posted by: ijuma on May 29, 2008 at 05:06 PM

• Congratulations to Kohsuke.

  It is fantastic for the entire community when a open source developer who grows a hobby project into the success that Hudson has become can leave his day job to spend his working hours on that hobby.

  Cheers mate.

  Posted by: mikenereson on May 29, 2008 at 07:48 PM

• Great news, can't wait to see what else you have in store !

  Posted by: huybrechts on May 30, 2008 at 12:23 AM

• Absolutely great job! Well done!

  Posted by: svadu on May 30, 2008 at 01:13 AM

• Great!

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on May 30, 2008 at 01:59 AM

• Congrats! This means a lot for Hudson momentum! I think Im already seeing that you are implementing the plugin thingie, that is great!

  Posted by: redsolo on May 30, 2008 at 10:34 AM

• Congratulations!
  We are using Hudson with a great pleasure and it helped us to implement a continuous integration loop after every check-in. It saved us a lot of trouble later on.
  A great feature to this would be: supply a patch to Hudson to test before committing it. I have seen this feature at TeamCity in a demo and it is really great to test (major) changes before committing it.
  

  Posted by: cbos on May 30, 2008 at 12:29 PM

• Really good news - a big thank you for your effort and good luck with your new "fulltime" project - waiting for new cool ideas ;-)

  Posted by: sven on May 30, 2008 at 01:44 PM

• My congratulations! Hudson is one of the few tools we use at our 'software factory' that just works out of the box. This is a no-bullshit product that has a lot of potential. Already quite impressed...

  Posted by: fcorneli on May 30, 2008 at 02:15 PM

• Thank you for the kind words, folks. I'll do my best.

  Posted by: kohsuke on May 30, 2008 at 04:23 PM

• Congratulations! good to see more time being spent on what is one of the best CI tools

  Posted by: bvansomeren on May 31, 2008 at 07:49 AM

• Kohsuke, I couldn't be more excited about you working on Hudson fulltime and implementing some great automation features. However, I certianly hope projects such as JAXB don't suffer without you because you did great work on the those projects as well.

  Posted by: jasonchaffee on June 01, 2008 at 05:58 PM

• Sweet! Congradulations, Kosuke!

  Posted by: johnsmart on June 02, 2008 at 01:04 AM

• Congrats! Thanks for all your hard work, and hope that you get all the satisfaction and pleasure out of the project you have had in the past in the future as your fulltime commitment.

  Posted by: davidseymore on June 02, 2008 at 07:57 AM

• Congrats.

  Posted by: qmahmood on June 04, 2008 at 08:01 AM

• Great! We are also Hudson users. It greatly simplified and automated the build process. Thanks.

  Posted by: guruwons on June 05, 2008 at 11:30 PM

• Hudson rocks! Congrats, Kohsuke!

  Posted by: jazzjack on June 09, 2008 at 08:46 PM

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