The rise of Jenkins and Jenkins User Meetings

Nicolas de Loof from BreizhJUG, the Java User Group from Rennes, France, talks about Jenkins and Jenkins User Meetings.

Jenkins (aka Hudson) is the de-facto standard for continuous integration in the java world, but it is also an active, growing community of plug-in developers. Thanks to its extensible design and very open contribution model, many developers have contributed value-added plug-ins, so that nowadays Jenkins can be used for a large set of use cases. Including continuous integration for ruby, python, .Net, and more , but, beyond languages, many other processes. Some use it for QA and release management, some use it to trigger batch Business Intelligence processes, or as an infrastructure scheduling tool.

The first Jenkins User Conference (JUC) was held on October 2^nd in San Francisco, bringing together the fast evolving community, to look at current usage, the future and brainstorming new uses to explore.  Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the keynote speaker, is the creator of Hudson and writer of the majority of Hudson core single-handedly.

Many local meetings are taking place internationally and as the local Java User Group Leader, I organized one of these “Jenkins User Meetings”  last evening in Rennes, France. During the 2 hour meeting, users and contributors talked about user cases, feedback or technical tips:

*       JavaScript web application continuous integration with Selenium web U.I. testing (Laurent Roger)

*       Continuous delivery with Build Pipelines and operations workflows (Sébastien Brousse)

*       “DogFood” use of Jenkins at CloudBees (Nicolas De loof)

*       Live development of a Jenkins plug-in from scratch (Gregory Boissinot)

Such events are a nice place to discover advanced uses of Jenkins and more generally about application lifecycle automation, and also to meet with contributors. Debates on functionality often bring attendees together to create a new plug-ins together, with the community valuing new contributions.  If there is no such event near you, just create one! You would be surprised to know there are some advanced Jenkins users living in your neighbourhood, and many folks with nice experiences to share. Long live Jenkins!