Jenkins

Jenkins, previously known as Hudson, is an open source continuous integration (CI) tool written in Java. The project renamed itself after a dispute with Oracle who claims the right to trademark the Hudson name and has applied for such a trademark as of December 2010. (Complicating matters, Oracle has decided to continue development under the Hudson name, creating two parallel versions each considering the other a fork.)

Jenkins provides continuous integration services for software development, primarily in the Java programming language. It is a server-based system running in a servlet container such as Apache Tomcat. It supports SCM tools including CVS, Subversion, Git and Clearcase, and can execute Apache Ant and Apache Maven based projects as well as arbitrary shell scripts and Windows batch commands. The primary developer of Jenkins is Kohsuke Kawaguchi. Released under the MIT License, Jenkins is free software.

Builds can be started by various means, including being triggered by commit in a version control system, scheduling via a cron-like mechanism, building when other builds have completed, and by requesting a specific build URL.

Around 2007 the project emerged as a popular alternative to CruiseControl and other open-source build servers. At the JavaOne conference in May 2008 the software was the winner of the Duke's Choice Award in the Developer Solutions category.

Jenkins was originally developed as the Hudson project. During November 2010, an issue arose in the community of Hudson with respect to the infrastructure used, which grew to encompass questions over the stewardship and control by Oracle. Negotiations between the principal project contributors and Oracle took place, and although there were many areas of agreement a key sticking point was the trademarked name "Hudson". As a result, on January 11, 2011, a call for votes was made to change the project name from "Hudson" to "Jenkins". The proposal was overwhelmingly approved by community vote on January 29, 2011 creating the Jenkins project. On February 1, 2011 Oracle indicated that they intended to continue development of Hudson, considering Jenkins to be a fork rather than a rename. Jenkins and Hudson will therefore continue as two independent projects, each claiming the other is the fork. As of 13. May 2011, Jenkins had 98 project members and 507 public repositories on github, Hudson 8 project members and 1 public repository. The one month bug statistics is similar: for Jenkins 270 bugs were opened and 182 closed, for Hudson 32 bugs were opened and 37 closed the last thirty days. By number of commits both projects show currently still approximately the same numbers.