Hudson

Everyday when I walk into CSDL, the first thing I do is to look at the Twitter message board and the Hudson dashboard. They are both fun and informative. The Twitter message board lists all updates of everyone within the channel, it gives a sense of where everyone is going. Whereas for the Hudson dashboard, it gives visual representation of the project status. At CSDL, Hudson is displaying the status of all hackystat projects. Just take a quick look and the red(build failed) or blue(build suceeded) icons together with the "weather signs" gives a very clear picture of how the projects are doing. It is interesting to see how a single screen can provide so much information and gives a big picture of the system. It facinated me but at the same time, it gives me the impression that Hudson is quite complicated and would not be very easy to set up. I am proved wrong after installing Hudson in order to become familar with continuous integration.

So basically, my concept of continuous integration used to a simple statement: compiling and building the system as frequent as possible, such as whenever the system has been updated. After going through the tutorial and the reading, I got a more throughout idea of it, such as the benefits and basic requirements of it.

From the tutorial, it explored Hudson. The first impression is: it is so java. I know before that Hudson is written in Java but what I didn't expect is it provided such extensive supoorts to Java QA tools, such as Ant, JUnit, PMD etc. Installation of Hudson was surprisingly easy. I simply download the war file, deployed it in tomcat and I was ready to define my first Hudson project, which is the Visual Studio Sensor.

As mentioned above, Hudson provides extensive support to Java project and the tutorial also mainly covered steps in setting up a Java project. Since our sensor project is written in C#, I was worried at first if it would be hard to set it up in Hudson. But on the whole, everything were fine, the project is easily ported into Hudson. However, I faced problems when I tried to build it for real from command line using "DevEnv C:/VSSensor/VisualStudioSensor.sln /Build" as I would do on my computer. The problem is that it cannot run DevEnv and in the end, my group partner Jared solved the problem by having the buildsensor.bat.

In order to put the sensor project on the CSDL server, the computer would first of all need to have Visual Studio installed and then follow the usual procedure of setting up a project, type in the command prompt to execute build and point the path to the buildsensor.bat. Compared to building a Java project, this is more troublesome. So I am thinking if we can employ NAnt to automate the build process so that we don't have to build the system by command. This NAnt plugin could be useful.