Got Pulse?

Lately I’ve been testing a bunch of the continous integration servers. I’ve gone through installations of CruiseControl, Parabuild, Continuum, Anthill, Luntbuild and now, Pulse.

Pulse is, for such a new product (current version is 1.0.4) an amazing piece of software. It got a very nice, intuative interface, support for the main SCMs (CVS, SVN, Perforce), SCM or timer triggered builds, support for the main build tools (Ant, Maven, Maven2, make) as well as custom builds. It also got a clever feature where the CI build defintion is stored with the source code in the SCM.

With the requirements we have at work, there are three major features missing, remote builds, project dependencies and LDAP integration. LDAP, which is a must have for us, is scheduled for 1.1. Remote builds is currently more of the nice-to-have type of requirement but based on the DamageControl matrix it seems like it’s planned for the near future. So, that leaves project dependencies (if project X has been updated, also build project Y and Z which depends on X). Feature has been requested (requires login) so hopefully it will be coming.

Even with these shortcoming, I think that Pulse got a bright future in this competitive space. It seems that Aussie developers just can’t fail these days.