I have been experimenting with Hudson for several weeks now and I like the tool much better than Cruise Control. Not to say it does not have its issues, it generally works very really. I have mostly had issues getting reports to show up in the project. For example, it appears that on a new project, jUnit test results will not show up until after the first completely successfully loop; kind of strange. One issue that is really frustrating me, the Testability Explorer plug-in; I just can’t seem to get the report integrated, all of the other plug-ins have worked as expected.
There is one big difference between Cruise Control and Hudson, which I have not exactly come to grips with yet: the handling of build errors. Hudson introduces the the concept of Job Stability. Traditionally, I relied on Ant to determine the success or failure of the build, but with Hudson, it is also possible to determine the stability or health. Most plug-ins allow you to provide custom ranges to indicate the job’s stability, based on the number of errors or warnings generated by the component. On most of my projects, we did not allow any PMD or Checkstyle errors, so job stability was never much of an issue. However, there are many projects that allow Checkstyle, PMD, and even jUnit errors; this is where the stability metric can be really helpful. This would also be useful when introducing a new tool into a project and it takes time to cleanup the issues.
I found a very well written article for setting up a Hudson server. If you are really ambitious, the article walks you through setting up a Tomcat or JBoss installation. I originally setup Hudson using Tomcat, but most of my experimental work, I have used the built-in Servlet Container; it is a little easier and makes the frequent updates as simple as a mouse click.
