Editor’s Note: This is a very rough set of notes from John Ferguson Smart’s presentation at JavaOne 2010. Unlike Kohsuke’s presentation, John spent a lot of time in demos which made live-blogging a bit difficult.

John takes the stage at 9:30, this presentation is totally different from yesterday’s presentation from Kohsuke

Taking Hudson a little further, beyond just scheduling a build job.

Who is not using Hudson, less than 10% raise hands.

Focusing on the more technical/nitty-gritty things with Hudson. Looking at:

Who uses Hudson for automated deployment, a handful raise their hands. Plenty of Tomcat and JBOSS users automating deployment. John going to use Tomcat for the automated deployment demo in this presentation.

John mentions he’s authoring the "Continuous Integration with Hudson" book, which will be available for download as it comes out.

Let’s talk about Continuous Integration! Summing up what CI is in three words: feedback, visibility and delivery. CI is about snappy feedback. You want feedback in minutes.

Visibility should be associated with continuous integration, getting everybody in the product life cycle into the loop with continuous integration (product people, QA, developers, etc).

What makes Hudson so great? (according to John)

First demo, the Hudson dashboard (starring the Nested View plugin). Starting with a basic dashboard filled with some unstable and stable builds. Cloudy builds thanks to Cobertura coverage grading.

Using the Nested View plugin to group views to make the dashboard more useflu for a ton of jobs.

Covering build radiators, not enough of the audience uses radiators. John advocates commandeering big monitors for radiators as part of your "notification strategy"

Covering the basic version control integration, John highly recommneds using a "Repository Browser". "The point is, you want one" John starts improvising with making some changes, pops over to Eclipse and refactors some code, commits and kicks off a build. Navigates to the source changes for the newly broken build in "Sventon", his repository browser of choice which was connected to the job

John shows the job using Maven integration and deploying artifacts to the Maven repository he’s set up on his local machine.

Hudson will automatically keep track of jar files/war files, so enable the "Discard Old Builds" checkbox to prevent Hudson from eating all kinds of disk space. Useful to only discard the artifacts for the last X builds instead of the test results/code coverage.

Desktop build notifiers are quite useful, email can tend to get clutter/lost in the mess with everything else coming into your inbox.