My last rave about Continuous Integration (CI)… I happened to find a really interesting document this week, and I just had to share it… The main point that I wanted to stress is the value of CI. The study was from a very small sample, but the results where in line with my personal views. The document is a very good comparison of twelve different tools and provides a good background on why one would use CI. It is easy to read and contains lots of interesting graphs.
The document is a study of Continuous Integration tools by Fontys University of Applied Sciences in Venlo, Netherlands. This study showed that Cruise Control is still the leader in this space; probably due t 
o the fact that the Cruise Control has been around for almost 10 years. Hudson, which has only been around for 2 years, appears to be closing in fast on the Cruise Control market share. I found another website that shows Hudson with a significant portion of the CI market. To my surprise, there appears to only be a couple of real contenders, all of the other tools are not well represented.
I also wanted to throw in this last graph to reinforce the dominance of Subversion as a version control system. It has been interesting to watch how fast the open-source community moved away from CVS over the last couple of years. I think it will be very interesting to follow the growth of Git. It has received a lot of press over the past year and seems to create a religious debate when compared with other tools. Just what we need! I was shocked to see the significant projects using Git: Ruby on Rails, Android, Fedora, X.org, just to name a few.
