Bamboo Vs. Hudson(a.k.a. Jenkins) vs Any other CI systems

Anyone out there have experience with both Hudson and Bamboo? Any thoughts on the relative strengths and weaknesses of these products?

Okay, since folks keep mentioning other CI products I'll open this up further. Here are my general problem. I want to setup a CI system for a new project. This project will likely have Java components (WARs and JARs), some python modules, and possibly even a .NET component. So I want a CI server that can:

1. Handle multiple languages,
2. Deploy artifacts to servers (i.e. deploy the war if all the unit tests pass.)
3. I would also like something that integrated with a decent code coverage tool.
4. Good looking reports are nice, but not essential.
5. Multiple notification mechanisms when things go wrong.
6. I'm not worried about hosting. I'll either run it on a local server or on an Amazon instance.
7. Also, this maybe pie in the sky, but is there something that can also build iPhone apps?

Disclaimer: I work on Bamboo and therefore I am not going to comment on features of other CI products since my experience with them is limited.

To answer your specific requirements:

> Handle multiple languages

Bamboo has out of the box support for multiple languages. Customers use it with Java, .Net, PHP, JavaScript etc. That being said, most build servers are generic enough to at least execute a script that can kick off your build process.

> Deploy artifacts to servers (i.e. deploy the war if all the unit tests pass.)

Bamboo 2.7 supports Build Stages, which allow you to break up your build into a Unit Test Stage and a Deploy Stage. Only if the Unit Test Stage succeeds, the build will move on to the Deploy Stage. In Bamboo 3.0 we will support Artifact sharing between stages, allowing you to create an Artifact (e.g. your war) in the first Stage and use this Artifact in the following Stages for testing and deployment.

> I would also like something that integrated with a decent code coverage tool.

Bamboo comes with support for Clover and also has a plugin available for Cobertura.

> Good looking reports are nice, but not essential.

Bamboo has a whole bunch of reports which are nice, but not essential :)

> Multiple notification mechanisms when things go wrong.

Bamboo can notify you via email, RSS, IM, an IDE plugin or a nice wallboard that is visible to the whole team.

> I'm not worried about hosting. I'll either run it on a local server or on an Amazon instance.

From experience, it is generally cheaper to host your own CI server. But if you need to scale, Bamboo makes it easy to distribute your builds to additional local agents or scale out to Amazon via Elastic agents.

> Also, this maybe pie in the sky, but is there something that can also build IPhone apps?

Similar to the answer to your first question, most CI servers will be able to build iPhone apps in some ways. It's possible that there is a little more scripting required though.

Price: Bamboo is not free(apart from our free starter license)/libre/open-source, but you will get Bamboo's source-code if you purchase a commercial license and full support. Compared to the cost of computing power and potential maintenance required for a CI server, the cost of a Bamboo license is rather small.

Hope this helps.

I have not used Bamboo but I have used Hudson, Cruise and TFS and out of all of them Hudson was hands down the best. It is ridiculously easy to set up and has a really nice web GUI for project configuration. What is great about Hudson is that it supports pretty much any language and feature you could want assuming someone has written a plug-in for it, which they probably have.

http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Plugins

We used it to run .NET, Java and C++ builds on timed intervals as well as SVN checkins with automated test harnesses and it was great. The place before last I worked at started some iPhone development just before I left and I believe they were using Hudson for that too.

Plus it's free!

Bamboo vs Hudson, at a very superficial level, seems to come down to:

• Bamboo: Easy to use and good looking
• Jenkins: Rough around the edges, but is far more flexible than Bamboo

Both Bamboo and Jenkins have numerous bugs (you will run into problems) but at least with Jenkins you are much more likely to have a workaround until it's fixed. With Bamboo, you're stuck waiting for an update.

Disclaimer: I'm working with Jenkins.

In our organization (quite big, more than 100 developers), we found also these two features very useful:

1. CAS plugin with matrix project security strategy
2. Build Pipeline Plugin
3. LTS release schedule.

About your questions:

1. OK
2. SCP PLUGIN or SSH PLUGIN
3. We use FINDBUGS, Static Analysis Collector Plug-in, Static Code Analysis Plug-ins, Task Scanner Plugin
4. Previous at point 3 + Jenkins DocLinks plugin
5. We use email Jenkins Email Extension Plugin, but it supports also other systems, like rss, twitter publish, sms...
6. We are running in a Tomcat Hosting, Locally.
7. Yes.

Well, I haven't used Bamboo so far, but one difference is that Hudson is free/libre/open-source software.

If you're willing to pay for it, Anthill does all of these you're looking at. We use it at my firm for our web team, and it's pretty powerful.

>Handle multiple languages

Out of the box, it automates your existing scripts and manages the artifacts they produce no matter what language.

>Deploy artifacts to servers (i.e. deploy the war if all the unit tests pass.)

Deployment can be added as a step in your build process. I'm not sure you'd want to deploy directly to production, but you certainly could if management says you have to.

>I would also like something that integrated with a decent code coverage tool.

They integrate out of the box with Clover, Cobertura, Emma, Checkstyle, CodeSonar, Coverity, FindBugs, Fortify, Klocwork, PMD and Sonar.

>Good looking reports are nice, but not essential.

I'm not sure what reports are available but there is a reports tab (I don't go in there :-) )

>Multiple notification mechanisms when things go wrong.

I know it can do email (and therefore sms), integrates with a few IM services.

>I'm not worried about hosting. I'll either run it on a local server or on an Amazon instance.

I saw a demo of them firing up a cloud session from an image, complete with an agent for deployment. We run it on a typical Linux box, but I know some folks run it on a VMWare server.

>Also, this maybe pie in the sky, but is there something that can also build IPhone apps?

This would fall under the first one, probably.