Whilst Jenkins 1.397 was released this weekend, Sonatype have backed Hudson for their users. Originally hosted at Java.net, the problems with the Kenai transition precipitated the original move of the community (and the codebase) onto GitHub, and ultimately the rebranding/fork of Jenkins from Hudson.
After the split, Oracle announced that Hudson would continue on the Oracle/Java infrastructure, as before. Sonatype, who have a commercial product based on Hudson, have stepped in to fill the void and have been commiting changes based on the Mavenization of Hudson.
Sonatype have experience in converting organically grown projects; Maven 3 is the work of many tests and refactorings to be built on a dependency injection framework (Guice) as covered by InfoQ last year. The same plan will apply to Hudson's migration, which though powerful, has forked copies of dependent libraries bundled inside its WAR. By modernizing the dependency mechanism, Sonatype hopes to make it easier for developers to contribute in the future. The Hudson-JSR330 GitHub fork contained the work that Sonatype had done (prior to the split) and now made public through the course of its evolution.
Now, it looks like Hudson's future is again back on GitHub after Jason van Zyl tweeted the results of the hudson-dev vote having received Oracle's Ted Farrell and Winston Prakash approval for the change. The Hudson name is available at github.com/hudson as the name was freed up after the Jenkins name change.
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 and it's likely that the two will drift apart over time. Ironically, although Hudson has kept the name, the refactorings to support JSR-330 and Mavenization of the build process represent far bigger changes than the ongoing and incrementally evolving Jenkins.
