Apache Maven is an open source build automation tool.
N/A
Hudson CI (discontinued)
Score 4.0 out of 10
N/A
Oracle acquired and then supported Hudson Continuous Integration through 2016. Oracle no longer updates or supports Hudson. It was available free and open source under an MIT license, but it is no longer being developed, and is no longer available.
Building and automating packaging of software can be a challenging task. As the complexity of the project grows so do the dependencies on third-party artifacts. Using Maven we can define and manage the project structure centrally and it helps improve overall build times.
Though it has a few setup issues, once you are done with setup it works like charm so one time setup issues won't bother. Reporting, version tracking, debugging everything is helpful and more clear and it reduces effort, in our scenario our QA team integrated their script with Hudson so that after every release it will get triggered automatically and developers will know if there is any major issue.
One of the issues with building software using Apache Maven is that its cache resolution is not optimal. It pulls down all the artifacts onto the developer's local machine and can sometimes result in conflicts.
The build process can vary in time and gets progressively longer as the project's complexity increases.
The setup needs to be more user friendly, currently for first time users CI doesn't provide more guidelines.
JMeter tool can be integrated but it's not easy, user has to follow and do research before setup. A simpler way would help make the process more user friendly.
Selenium tool like JMeter can be integrated, if its Webservice it's easy but for UI automation integration not enough information is provided.
The overall usability of Apache Maven is very good to us. We were able to incorporate it into our company's build process pretty quickly. We deployed it to multiple teams throughout the entire enterprise. We got good feedback from our developers stating that Apache Maven has simplified their build process. It also allowed to to standardize the build process for the entire enterprise, thus ensure that each development team is using the same, consistent process to build code.
I can't speak to the support, as I've never had issues. Apache Maven "just works," and errors were user errors or local nexus errors. Apache Maven is a great build/dependency management tool. I give it a 9/10 because occasionally the error message don't immediately indicate a solution...but again, those errors were always user or configuration errors, and the Maven documentation is extensive, so I don't find fault in Maven, but in its users.
Ant is useful if your build is heavily based on customs scripts running in the right order. Maven greatly simplifies the process to keep track of and download build dependencies compared with Apache Ant. If your build is based on multiple custom scripts running in a specific order there is a lot of overhead in Maven compared to Apache Ant.
Oracle CI in terms of setup lags behind all above products, but then its use is also limited to release management so we can't really compare. Majority of organizations have dedicated team to help with CI Process so they take care of managing all jobs and setup.