Hudson is sweet, now the build can tweet

I recently set up a new Hudson build so the Equinox team could test their changes in a branch instead of releasing everything to HEAD. Hudson, like Eclipse, has a rich variety of plugins that can expand the functionality of your build. Hudson has a twitter plugin and thus Eclipse (test) builds tweet here

http://twitter.com/eclipsebuilds

Right now, there are only a few messages about the test builds I started, and stopped when I saw that build was proceeding as normal. In any case, it's pretty cool.

Hudson also has plugins to use additional slave machines on the network to run the build on a faster machine if the current build machine is too busy. It also has plugins to provision Amazon EC2 images and run the build on a slave in the cloud. We currently run about 54,000 JUnit test per platform multipled by five test machines during each build. We run tests on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. But the tests take a long time to complete simply because of the number of tests we run and the lack of additional hardware to run more tests in parallel. It would be fantastic to be able to run the tests on parallel on many machines and finish in fraction of the time they take today. That would allow us to reduce the number of breaking build issues. But of course, this will take significant testing to implement. Sounds like fun!

References
Run JUnit tests in parallel
Hudson build for the p2 branch