My company is considering changing continuous integration servers (I won't say which one we have now, so I won't skew your responses in anyway :) ) I wondering if anybody has any recommendations? Best user experience, level of difficulty to maintain, etc...
Our code is all in java, and we use ANT as a build tool.
as usual with java world, there is the open source world and the commercial world.
We've already seen pretty good coverage of the various offerings.
Hudson : I don't know of a single other java server offering that is as easy as this to evaluate. java -jar hudson.war -- how easy can it get than that ? NOT only can you use it on windows, you can use it on all the usual java platforms. Ant, Maven and a host of other build platforms are supported.
The best thing about Hudson is the plug-in capability. It is being developed almost continuously. You ask for a feature and it won't take long for it to be done.
I usually don't like sounding like a fanboy, but this app/developer/community sure impresses me.
BR,
~A
We've been using Automated Build Studio and have been pretty happy with it. It's a windows app, so you're stuck on a windows build server, but on the plus side it's super easy to set up, maintain and use. You build your process from components via point and click, and can use scripting if none of the components meet your needs.
Last year on the a conference in the USA i first heard about Cruise Control .net on a 1 hour presentation, on my way home in the plain i decided to implement a small POC for our company and succcesfuly done it in less than 5 hours (including all the learning i could have done).
I am using it since than and i must say that i am very pleased with the results, and ease of operation, There are some drawback (E.g. lack of distribution of task across servers scale although you can monitor several servers) i found a a bug in one of the implementation and because it is an open source i could have fixed it very quickly (big advantage) - i created a little [project][1] in codeplex to contain my fixes before i contribute them to the community as a check in. I highly encourage you to look at this platform, also it would be nice if you can say what you actually need.
[1]: http://www.codeplex.com/DavidovitzCCE project
An org I run (openqa.org) has, at one time or another, used just about all of them. In terms of easy setup, go with TeamCity or Bamboo. But in terms of overall reliability, you might want to look at Hudson. I really like JetBrains, but we found TeamCity to get in to weird states after a while, causing our builds to be very unreliable. Too bad, since I love IDEA!
I guess I will be the first to mention Luntbuild. Aside from the less-than-catchy name, it's a great CI server.
Check out the Live demo. account/password demo/demo
Note: The live demo is a few releases back.
We've used Cruise Control with decent results. We have since started using Maven for the build tool in all our projects. With that came the move to Hudson for CI which is very nice. If you think a move to Maven might be in your future, I'd recommend it. I think Hudson can even be used to call Ant tasks though a Maven wrapper might be in order.
http://hudson-ci.org/