Hudson and Jenkins: Two Months Later

April 4, 2011 at 8:12 pm (Hudson, Java, Jenkins, Oracle)

For some reason I’m finding the Hudson / Jenkins split to be particularly interesting, so I’ve updated the chart from my last post on the subject to span two months, rather than the initial two weeks:

It still looks like Jenkins is outpacing Hudson. To be fair, Jason van Zyl (who is working on Hudson) gave advance warning that we’d see something like this:

We are moving more carefully and probably slower then we might like, but we feel that, in order to aggressively add features in the future, the testing infrastructure, development infrastructure, and core features need to be in place. All this work I’m talking about will likely take a release or two to get in place but once that is done we will be moving at a radically different pace.

Nevertheless, one wonders how much longer this can go on before the momentum becomes irreversible.

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Hudson and Jenkins: Two Weeks Later

February 15, 2011 at 10:50 pm (Hudson, Java, Jenkins, Oracle)

Most Java developers have probably heard about the recent Hudson/Jenkins split. InfoQ’s most recent article on the topic, by Alex Blewitt, ends on an upbeat note:

With the commercial support of both Oracle and Sonatype behind the development of Hudson, the future looks good for the eponymous continuous integration tool. However, Jenkins continues to evolve as well [etc, etc]…

I’m not so sure about Hudson’s future. Fortunately, there are a number of easily measurable indicators that should allow us to gauge the progress of these two rival projects.

First, we can look at commit counts. Specifically, commit counts should provide a decent leading indicator of the health of each project, given that they generally foretell whether or not the project is likely to address user needs in new releases.

Second, we can look at user mailing list post counts, which generally tell the story of user uptake after all of the hard work has gone into fixing bugs, adding features and cutting new releases. I would consider user mailing list usage to be a lagging indicator.

So after two weeks, what does the commit picture look like? Well, Hudson has seen 40 commits since the split [1], while Jenkins has seen 166 commits. It’s not even close. As a leading indicator, this bodes well for Jenkins’ future.

What about user mailing list activity? Remember that logically this should be a lagging indicator. As such, I expected the Hudson user list to remain more active than the Jenkins user list for quite some time, even if Jenkins ends up overshadowing Hudson over time. Astonishingly, the Hudson user list has seen 55 posts since the split, while the Jenkins user list has seen 563 posts in the same time frame! Have users already decided, en masse, to adopt Jenkins over Hudson? That’s certainly the picture painted by these numbers.

Two weeks is an extremely small track record on which to base any conclusions, and some of these numbers may be distorted by infrastructure issues on the Hudson side, but I think it’s safe to say that Hudson’s future is a little murkier than Alex’s optimism might suggest. The good thing is that we’ll be able to revisit these numbers in 6 months and have a pretty clear idea of where things are headed :-)

[1] All of the counts in this post are as of the time of writing, and begin counting on February 1st, 2011.

UPDATE (4/4/2011): I’ve posted a newer commit graph here.

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Note to Self: Killing Oracle Sessions

February 18, 2009 at 10:26 pm (Note to Self, Oracle)

To find all sessions for a specific user connected via the Oracle JDBC driver:

select * from v$session where username='X' and program like '%JDBC%';

To kill all of these database sessions:

declare
  statement varchar(100);
  cursor c is
    select 'alter system kill session '''
      || sid || ',' || serial# || ''' immediate'
    from v$session
    where username='X'
    and program like '%JDBC%';
begin
  dbms_output.enable;
  open c;
  loop
    fetch c into statement;
    exit when c%notfound;
    dbms_output.put_line('Executing: ' || statement);
    execute immediate statement;
  end loop;
  close c;
end;

This will result in output similar to the following:

Executing: alter system kill session '225,46' immediate
Executing: alter system kill session '226,110' immediate
Executing: alter system kill session '233,6617' immediate

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