Best of this Week Summary 15 - 21 July 2007

Related to this posting which mentions a good article about Continous Integration (CI), I found this interesting article which compares four open source CI tools: CruiseControl, Continuum, Luntbuild and Hudson. In short it is telling you:

CruiseControl:
+ Open source
+ Actively checks your source control system (SCM) for changes
+ Good notification options (including RSS)
- Bit more complex to setup
- Wrapper Ant build script/Maven SCM plugin needed
- Inter-project dependencies not a strong point

Continuum:
+ Open source
+ Easy setup
+ Strong Maven integration
+ Good notification options (though no RSS notification)
- Less extensive list of suppored SCM
- Checks SCM changes on user defined scheduled times (so not actively)
- Inter-project dependencies not a strong point

Luntbuild:
+ Open source
+ Easy setup
+ Most feature-richh of the OSS versions
+ Supports inter-project dependencies
+ Supports many SCMs
+ Separation of build scripts and schedulers
- Not so many notification options
- Checks SCM changes on user defined scheduled times (so not actively)

Hudson:
+ Easy setup (war deployment)
+ Scheduling and ability to poll SCM for changes
+ Good built-in JUnit support
+ Unique fingerprint per build so you can easily find out what was in that build
+ Supports inter-project dependencies
- Not so many notification options (but RSS is available)
- Supports not so many SCMs
- Lack of flexibility (e.g Ant build.xml has to be in your project's root directory)

Conclusion
Looking at the above +s and -s, my conclusion is that for smaller projects where inter-project dependencies are not important, CruiseControl or Continuum can be used. For larger projects with inter-project dependencies, Luntbuild and Hudson are a good option, though you really have to evaluate whether the new kid on the block Hudson is currently mature enough to be used in large projects.