Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Continuous Integration Servers

The authors of the recent book on Continuous Integration have undertaken a series of snapshots of CI servers, which will be a big help to everyone who is assessing CI.

There are many CI servers to choose from, as this table amply demonstrates. For myself, I am undertaking evaluations of three options; and after some preliminary research, I have decided on these finalists:

  • CruiseControl (the grand-daddy of them all and the defining CI server)
  • Continuum (because I work with Maven 2, this should be a good fit)
  • Hudson (admired for its ease of use)

I'll report on my findings, although the results will be colored somewhat by how well these tools work with my current project, whose CI needs are clear, but modest. Partly in preparation, I will shortly be hanging with the cool cats at CITCON, a CI conference being held October 19-20 in Brussels. Attendance is free but limited to 100 attendees. CITCON is the brainchild of Jeff Frederick and Paul Julius of CruiseControl fame, but it typically draws cognoscenti and users of other CI servers. The format is open, meaning that it's more of a series of BoF sessions than pure lecture. I'll report on the good stuff in future posts for those who can't make it to Belgium in time.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I am surprised not to see Atlassian Bamboo in your list, although I understand its pricing model might exclude it from the scope of your experiment.

In our environment (dozens of Maven built projects), Bamboo has proven far more stable than Continuum, from which we had to back off after a few months of usage.

Andrew Binstock said...

Thanks for this info. In view of the absence of data, the personal experience of users of CI tools and servers is particularly helpful.