Soapbox Rants and Raves

One of the best things about the Hudson Continuous Integration platform, is the amount of activity. People are constantly fixing problems and adding new functionality. I’m sure that some would say this is a bad thing, but even with the frequent releases, it is amazingly stable.

I have been moving projects to the Ivy Dependency Manager for the last couple of years. We have established a multi-repository solution, that allows us to control access to the repositories without impeding the progress of the development teams.  Introducing multiple repositories and transitive dependencies takes a little getting used to, so I have been adding an ivy.report task to each of the project’s build scripts.  Here is an example of Ivy dependency report. I think it is quite handy on multiple levels, but the primary benefit is displaying the dependencies of each component. Side benefits include showing the different types licenses used by each component, kind of nice for corporate environments. The report also shows where the components are resolved from, such as the legacy or sandbox repositories (indicating that you might need to do some promotion or upgrade work before releasing the project).

My problem was, how to tie the Ivy dependency report into my continuous integration process. Building the report was easy, but how could I make it available on the main Hudson project page? Unfortunately, there was no plug-in to make this happen; I was actually thinking about writing my own plug-in this summer, but never quite got around to it (or blogging for that matter!) Fortunately, this appears to have been a common need and someone was nice enough to release a really nice plug-in this past July, called DocLinks. It allows you to add multiple links to items generated by the build process. The process could not be simpler.  The links will automatically show up on your main project page, but will not be active until the next build completes.

This also solved a problem that I have with the Testability Explorer plug-in. I have about a 50% success rate with this plug-in. I am able to generate both the XML and HTML files for all projects without issue, however, the Hudson Plug-in reports nothing for half of the projects; I have yet to figure out the pattern. Anyway, the DocLinks plug-in now lets me add a link to the Testability Explorer HTML report, so that everyone can always see the results, independent of the Hudson integration.

There is one area that the Hudson community could be a little more helpful. The Hudson tool is very good about showing you when updates are available for itself or installed plug-ins. However, there appears to be now good process for discovering new plug-ins. I even follow the Hudson mailing lists, and there are no notices about new or updated components; the only way I know about upgrades is to click the “configure” link every so often, when I actually remember! To find out about new plug-ins is even worse, I have to look at the Plug-in page, and notice if there is something new. There are so many plug-ins now, it is almost impossible to know if something has been added. Hopefully, they will add some kind of search for recently added or updated feature to their page; I’m sure that I’m not the only one that would appreciated it!