Hudson Plugin for Eclipse

Lusting over the Atlassian Connector’s support for Bamboo made me decide to check out what support there was for Hudson in Eclipse. So I checked out the Hudson Eclipse Plugin. My thoughts: not bad, but not great – a lot of potential is there, though.

The good:

• non cluttered UI.
• good “at-a-glance” summaries of the current state.
• able to jump straight to the console output of a build. (Finally! Why can’t the actual Hudson webapp do that?)
• alert notifications when builds break.
• able to selectively ignore modules you don’t care about.

The bad:

• alert notifications are intrusive – dialog alerts aren’t what I want. A nice Growl-style alert, like that used by the Mylyn tasks, would be good – an alert that slides out of a corner, lets you see it, then goes away by itself. (You can disable the alerts altogether, but then you get no notification unless you’re watching the window)
• console view doesn’t scroll during a running build
• no “last built time”; Hudson seems to freeze sometimes, and this would help spot that
• Can’t see the build queue – the one AJAX part the Hudson webapp gets right
• Would be good to be able to temporarily ignore build failures (or take responsibility) – “Joe’s fixing that, so I can ignore that failed build until it’s working again”
• Hudson allows you to set up tab groups, with a subset of your projects. This plugin really should do that too; it makes managing large project sets a lot better.
• It only supports one Hudson server… some of us use more.

There’s nothing wrong or broken with the eclipse plugin, but there’s a lot of functionality missing that would be nice to have.

Author: Robert Watkins

My name is Robert Watkins. I am a software developer and have been for over 20 years now. I currently work for people, but my opinions here are in no way endorsed by them (which is cool; their opinions aren’t endorsed by me either). My main professional interests are in Java development, using Agile methods, with a historical focus on building web based applications. I’m also a Mac-fan and love my iPhone, which I’m currently learning how to code for. I live and work in Brisbane, Australia, but I grew up in the Northern Territory, and still find Brisbane too cold (after 22 years here). I’m married, with two children and one cat. My politics are socialist in tendency, my religious affiliation is atheist (aka “none of the above”), my attitude is condescending and my moral standing is lying down. View all posts by Robert Watkins