Comments on: Choosing a Continuous Integration Server

By: Muraleedhara Reddy

Muraleedhara Reddy — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 06:44:27 +0000

My vot is for HUDSON. No other thought required. If you want to go for still more robustness, more features with professional support go for AHP3(Anthill Professional 3).

By: Raghukiran

Raghukiran — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 04:54:19 +0000

As Eric quoted,It really depends on your needs.I tried out CC,Luntbuild and Hudson and found Hudson to be very impressive.Confguration doesnt take much time.The only thing it lacks is the Role based Permissions.As of now anybody who has access to it can start a build and can even delete the whole project.Hope they add it soon.The future looks bright for Hudson.

By: MikeT

MikeT — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 22:19:21 +0000

About 2-3 months ago we commissioned a huge evaluation of build tools which I undertook. What you need to draw up is a list of criteria that you require and work from there. What we found is that few tools are actually of any use for anything more than a simple project. Remember some of these tools have a killer feature missing; real time log and progress with an ability to cancel running builds! This can become infuriating. Oh and so can no permissions, we had developers ‘accidently’ click build on import projects that took 40 minutes to build and it causes chaos.

Hudson: Looking good, but immature. No dependancy management, no agent based system (so no deployment options), no lifecycle (so how do you know what state something is in?). Its future looks bright, expect it to be the open-source zen in another 6 months.

Cruise: For all but the simplist projects, a disaster. Used it in many companies, many configs. Its unstable, troublesome to configure and the UI is useless. All you can do is click ‘build’ - now you tell me how you do workflows and job progress?

Luntbuild: I haven’t got our review at hand, but it wasn’t worth the cost.

Pulse: If you have some money (its cheap), this eats up bamboo. Mark my words: its rocking. Gets no press and I don’t know why. Truly impressive for the SME on a budget wanting something that you can grow into.

Bamboo: Ok - so the love is there for Atlassian, we have JIRA/Confluence. But lets be honest - who deploys a 3 month old product into a corporate environment? Good future, good team, but needs another year to bed down.

Anthill Pro: For medium to large corporates its the only route. Expensive, but you get distributed agents, workflow, build lifecycle, dependancy management enterprise wide (this rocks) a clean UI, Active Directory integration that works really well.

Rational Buildforge: Waste of time. We had their sales team in and its just useless. Honestly, tens of thousands of dollars for what?

We’ve got AHP. For a company with tens of projects each with huge build processes including database config loading (AHP agents rock for this) its the best bet. Pulse was a very close second. Ignore the negative press for AHP 2. Its old; AHP 3 is very impressive.

But we’re not pitching a system for small teams, so in the majority of cases AHP is overkill; for example Cisco use it on hundreds of projects.

By: afsina

afsina — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 23:38:42 +0000

Hudson is my choice too. we are using it for a long time. the easiest one to install and configure so far.

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:30:42 +0000

I think the obvious question that nobody has asked is, “What are your needs? What do you want to get out of a CI tool?” There are a ton of tools out there and they have different strengths. Are you managing 2 projects or 20? Are dependencies between projects an issue? Are you thinking single server, or multiple? Is it all Maven? all Ant? Is there native code running around? Are you getting into deployments? How much do you like editing xml?

For Doug, I’m an Anthiller, and feel a need to give you an update and clarify. It should be noted that the AnthillPro 3.x line has replaced the persistence mechanism present in 2.x and the problems you describe are no longer an issue. The backend is now a proper database with transactional support, easy back-ups etc.

On the support side, the alternative to sending us your configuration data (not the whole install) would have been us sending you instructions for how to spend a few hours digging around in configuration files. For most people that’s not a lot of fun, so our support team took on that task for you to save you the trouble. That approach was used relatively rarely, but when it made sense it made sense. Cheers.

By: Adrian

Adrian — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:11:22 +0000

We also began with Cruise Control but then migrated to Luntbuild.

By: Douglas

Douglas — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 20:46:45 +0000

I have used Anthill in the past and have to say that it is an awful piece of software, even/especially the pro version. Combine highly unreliable (whoops it just deleted all our configurations again) with difficult to setup and maintain and awful support (please zip up your whole installation and send it to them type awful support). I would steer as far clear from that as I could.

By: Andrew Thompson

Andrew Thompson — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 18:10:04 +0000

Bamboo is very sophisticated. It has a growing collection of plugins that allow it to integrate nicely with Clover, PMD, Cobertura etc. All setup is done through the administration GUI, which is refreshing after dealing with CruiseControl configuration files for a few years.

Costs money, but comes with support. It is an Atlassian product. I don’t have any connection with them apart from using it.

By: Ray Tucson

Ray Tucson — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 15:17:56 +0000

Luntbuild +1

By: Carlo Bonamico

Carlo Bonamico — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 14:31:37 +0000

Hudson (http://hudson.dev.java.net) is definitely a robust choice; I have been using it for six months without a glitch, and it’s ease of use is up to and often beats current standards for web applications.