Jenkins and Node.js

So I've spent some time with Jenkins lately, and have good news and bad news.  The good news is, yes, you can integrate Node.js projects, tested through jasmine-node, with Jenkins.  Jasmine-node returns appropriate values when executed; 0 on a successful test run and 1 on a test failure.  Furthermore, it does seem you can use git with Hudson/Jenkins.   Integrating a builder that runs jasmine-node tests is possible too, perhaps following the lead of other plugins that have integrated node.js with Jenkins.

The bad news is that the integration is still rough and kinda kludgey, and needs some work from both the Jenkins and the jasmine-node ends to make things work smoothly.  Jenkins needs to support Node.js and Jasmine-node via custom builder plugins.  Furthermore, jasmine-node will likely need to generate test output that Jenkins can use to generate reports, and Jenkins will likely need a custom reporter and publisher of some kind.  This is important work that somebody needs to tackle to make Node.js attractive to professional development teams.  Node.js has some real advantages for developing RPC over HTTP infrastructures without unneeded web server cruft, something really important in next generation systems where web clients use HTML5 technologies like web workers to retrieve and process information, and act more like fully-fledged clients than simple pages as a result.

I'm going to begin to look at these issues, starting with jasmine-node integration and then reporting, in future posts.  I'm also going to start the development of a simple grocery list system using Node.js, HTML5, and likely the Android SDK.