HudsonAndOtherPlugins

Great things about Hudson plugins:

• Maven makes it easy to start
• Kohsuke is really helpful and the Hudson developers' mailing list is an excellent resource
• Hudson wiki has good plugin guides (if slightly out of date) and you can update them

Not so great things about Hudson plugins:

• Can be hard to figure out where you should plug in for your particular task
• Jelly difficult to work with - have to know just where to put your file
• Community (including Kohsuke) are not Maven experts, so:
  • can be hard to debug and fix leaky abstractions
  • creating your pom.xml is hit-and-miss
• Some plugins are version-locked to Hudson core version - break if you update Hudson

Hudson plugins we wish we had:

• Dependency graph showing which jobs trigger which other jobs [https://hudson.dev.java.net/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4321 Hudson issue 4321)
• GridGain integration (farms work out to multiple machines and JVMs as if in a single JVM)
• Detect slave configuration and auto-tag and group (all Windows machines, all machines with over 1GB RAM)
• Show timestamps in online console output, or even better, provide timings for each action (helps with performance-tuning your jobs)

Other tools:

• TeamCity also has plugins
• Cruise, BuildForge don't seem to

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