In January 2011, the Hudson developer community decisively voted to rename the project to Jenkins.
They subsequently migrated the original Hudson code base to a new GitHub project^1 and continued
their work there. The vast majority of core and plugin developers upped camp and followed Kohsuke
Kawaguchi and other core contributors to the Jenkins camp, where the bulk of the development activity
can be seen today.
After the fork, a majority of users also followed the Jenkins developer community and switched to
Jenkins. At the time of writing, polls show that some 75% of Hudson users had switched to Jenkins,
while 13% were still using Hudson, and another 12% were using both Hudson and Jenkins or in the
process of migrating to Jenkins.
Nevertheless, Oracle and Sonatype (the company behind Maven and Nexus) have continued to work
on the Hudson code base (now also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/hudson), but with a very
different focus. Indeed, the Sonatype developers have concentrating on major underlying infrastructure
changes around, among other areas, Maven integration, the dependency injection framework and the
plugin architecture.
1.5. Should I Use Jenkins or Hudson?
So should you use Jenkins or Hudson? Since this is a book on Jenkins, here are a few reasons why you
might want to opt for Jenkins:
- Jenkins is the new Hudson. In fact, Jenkins is simply the old Hudson with a new name, so if you
liked Hudson, you’ll like Jenkins! Jenkins uses the Hudson code base, and the development team
and project philosophy remain the same. In a nutshell, the original developers, who wrote the vast
majority of the Hudson core, simply resumed business as usual after the fork working on the Jenkins
project. - The Jenkins community. Like many of the more successful Open Source projects, much of
Hudson’s strength came from its large and dynamic community, and its massive adoption. Bugs
are identified (and generally fixed) much more rapidly, and, if you have a problem, chances are
someone else will have had it too! If you run into trouble, post a question on the mailing list or
IRC channel—there’s sure to be someone who can help. - The fast development pace. Jenkins continues the rapid release cycles that typified Hudson, which
many developers love. New features, new plugins and bug fixes come out weekly, and the turn-
around time for bug fixes can be very short indeed. And, if you prefer more stability, there are
always the LTS releases
And, in the interest of balance, here are some reasons you might prefer to stick with Hudson:
- If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. You already have a Hudson installation that you are happy with, and
don’t feel the need to upgrade to the latest version. - Enterprise integration and Sonatype tools. Hudson is likely to place a strong emphasis on
integration with enterprise tools such as LDAP/Active Directory, and the Sonatype products such