Sonatype lays out Hudson plans

The recent renaming/fork of the continuous integration system Hudson to Jenkins did not take all of the Hudson community with it, and now Maven specialist Sonatype has confirmed its plans to work with Oracle on Hudson, rather than Jenkins. The open source continuous integration software is widely used by developers to bring together all the phases of the software development process; this in turn makes it important to developers of tools such as Sonatype.

In a blog posting, Sonatype CTO Jason van Zyl outlined plans to reduce the dependency on forks of other projects, replacing Jelly as the user interface technology, creating more testing infrastructure for the project and working on detailed tracking of the provenance of the code. Van Zyl listed current work Sonatype was doing: this included Eclipse and Netbeans integration, Maven 3.x support and support for JSR330 dependency injection in plugins and throughout Hudson's architecture. Van Zyl praised Oracle's Winston Prakesh for creating detailed architectural documentation for Hudson; the lack of this documentation had "left the Hudson community mostly dependent on a single individual".

In comments to the posting, Jenkins lead developer and Hudson creator, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, responded by saying that van Zyl had over stated the problem of the forked dependencies but that he "certainly accept the blame for the less-than-optimal architecture choices". He pointed out though that development of applications like Hudson/Jenkins was organic and the decisions had accrued over 300 plugins developed for the system. Expanding on his own comments, Van Zyl called the decision for Jenkins to move away from Oracle "a bad one" and worries that without a large organisation such as Eclipse, IBM or Oracle, the "ardent and good-intentioned" plans of the Jenkins developers will not be usefully accomplished.

(djwm)