So I was reading a blog on Planet Eclipse (using the aggregator of course) when I noticed something about a build system called Hudson. (Can’t remember who wrote that post though, sorry). I was not really ready to replace CruiseControl (CC), but decided to check this thing out anyway. And that was a good idea.

Hudson is distributed in the form of one single WAR file. Just put it into a suitable location and do java -jar hudson.war. That’s it. The web interface is an improvement over CC and allows you to do pretty much everything. There is no need to edit configuration files by hand.

It has a large number of plug-ins supporting MSBuild, Bugzilla, FindBugs and much more. These can even be installed using the web interface. Hudson’s data directory is placed in ~/.hudson which is not really what I’d prefer, but it’s OK.

With some minor tweaking, the bootstrapping scripts that I was using for CC could be used. So there was not much work involved in getting it up and running. Far less than with CC.

Hudson is now my favourite build server