First Hudson Release from Eclipse Foundation

The Hudson team is pleased to announce its 3.0.0 Milestone 0 release from the Eclipse Foundation. We have worked diligently and expertly over the past year to get to this milestone release.  Since release 1.398  the Hudson community has benefited from the team’s work through the introduction of the 6-week release cycle, based on a new development and release process and the ongoing work on bugs, enhancements and new features

What is included in this release?

The M0 release is the first release of Hudson as a top level technology project from the Eclipse Foundation. It has been a very busy 12 months for us and that is shown in the large numbers of new features, enhancements and bug fixes the team has developed.

Over 50+ new features and enhancements cover:

• Maven 3
• Cascading Projects
• JAXB-based REST API and plugin,
• enhancements to
  • Parameterized Builds
  • Downstream Projects
  • User Management
  • Security and Authorization
  • UI
  • GIT support

Over 350 bugs across the full range of Hudson have been fixed especially focused on stability, performance and the core SCM plugins such as GIT and SVN.

In parallel to this, in August 2011 the team began the process of submitting the Hudson core code to the Eclipse Foundation  The foundation has stringent entry requirements on all project source code and third party licences to ensure they are IP and license clean. Hudson’s source code, split over 10 core modules, has now been approved and is available in the Eclipse GIT repository.

There are over 200 third party libraries distributed with Hudson (including many that relate only to plugins).  Some of these are LGPL licensed libraries that the Eclipse Foundation does not accept under any circumstances. The team developed and implemented a strategy to replace these with more suitable libraries ensuring little impact on the core code or Hudson plugins using them.

For example:

• The Java Native Access, JCaptcha and JFreechart  libraries have been repackaged as external plugins for this release. Additionally HawtJNI will be bundled as part of Hudson core for future releases, to replace the JNA support.
• The BIRT Charting engine will be the charting method of choice going forward, but backward compatibility with JFreechart is maintained by existing plugins through the simple addition of a dependency on the external JFreechart libary package.
• Winstone, originally used as the the standalone container for Hudson has been replaced by Jetty.

The balance of the libraries were considered for submission to the IP checking process.  In itself this is no small task. Each library has to be submitted with its source code.  Some of the libraries were so old that the code was not readily available or had been forked with local changes.

The Hudson team modernized the code through such means as replacing forked libraries with current versions and working with library owners to feed forked changes back into the latest library versions.  The Eclipse Foundation contacts owners and contributors to libraries to establish IP cleanliness.

As you can imagine, this is a labour intensive process but the work of both the Hudson team and library owners has ensured that over half of the 100+ third party libraries have been approved already. This core set of 100+ libraries represents those that are physically packaged in the core war.

The rationalization and approval process for the balance of the libraries is ongoing. But the result of this mammoth effort is that Hudson is ready to move forward and develop features related to the high level themes that the community agreed upon.

The final part of the effort in the leadup to this M0 release is the work that has been done on both the Hudson Eclipse website and wiki. Much of the content from the older hudson-ci.org has been rewritten or updated and moved to the new infrastructure. Over 70 pages are now available from the new sites, including the recently published Hudson Book (151 pages of material in it’s own right) that contains the most up to date information on installing, administering and using Hudson.

What can you contribute to this release?

As an alpha release we are not expecting miracles! But the release has gone through development and testing cycles and we are very pleased with the results.  You should be able to run this release of Hudson on your container of choice and expect it to behave well. You can install plugins  and expect them to run.

With the changes to libraries detailed above there may be some issues that we need to address quickly. Known issues will be with any plugin that uses JFreechart. We are in the process of either forking or contacting plugin owners to create the dependency on the external plugin. But the plugin may not yet be available from the update center. Keep an eye on the blog and Twitter feed for the latest news.

If you have any issues or further enhancements relating to this Eclipse release Please raise issues in the Eclipse Bugzilla system which you can find at https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/ – Hudson lives under the top level Eclipse Technology project. You will need to register for an Eclipse BugZilla account to log issues if you don’t already have one. For more information on the Hudson community, mailing lists, forums etc. please head over to the communities page.

Feel free to join us at the next community phone call to voice your opinions and experiences with this new release.

What is coming next?

It’s our intention to release monthly milestones until we get to our first approved Eclipse production release. By which time we feel that the Hudson project at Eclipse will be fully functional and ready for migration of your production servers. In the meantime, updates will continue in parallel on hudson-ci.org for all your production Hudson needs.

Susan Duncan