I’ve just released BuildMon Build Monitor v0.1, a Firefox Add-on that displays Hudson Build status on Firefox status bar panel. You can install it from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7522 .

This add-on is currently sandboxed (only registered users can click the ‘Add to Firefox’ button). It still needs at least a user review before I can nominate it for public access. So if you can help with a review, it will be highly appreciated. I’ve tested it on Firefox 2.0.14 and 3.0RC2 (Gran Paradiso), on Windows Vista and Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, against Hudson 1.211′s feed.

BuildMon uses Hudson orbs as the build status indicator.

• Blue orb (success) – all builds were successful.
• Yellow orb (warning) – there’s at least one failed build, but the latest build was a success.
• Red orb (failure) – the latest build failed, someone should fix it, the build breaker is not allowed to go for lunch or go home :p.

BuildMon development was quite straightforward. Mozilla Developer Center has a nice tutorial on Building an Extension, and XUL Planet’s Element Reference is very handy. The only problem I had was on the weird behaviour of the tooltip and popupmenu elements, it took me a while to figure out that placing them within the wrong parent elements resulted in the elements appearing when there are other add-ons installed, but not when it’s the only installed add-on.

BuildMon uses jQuery, Datejs, Pretty Date, and jFeed. I slightly modified jFeed to pass error callback from jQuery.ajax .

Hope you’ll find this add-on useful, and remember… thou shalt not ignore the red orb!

I’ve been using Hudson since its early version (way way before m2 support), mostly for my personal projects. Back then I used CruiseControl at work, and I also briefly looked at Continuum as another option. Hudson has by far been the best at providing the right balance between convenience and flexibility, mad props for that.