Pulse: Continuous Integration made easy
I’ve been a huge fan of utilizing a CI build tool in my development teams for a while now. I tried cron+ant, cron+maven, CruiseControl, Anthill. They all did a good job, but something was always missing. Well, look no further than Pulse from Zutubi. This is a truly fabulous product. Easy to set up, easy to use, easy to get everyone in your team hooked. In less than 10 mins I had a server setup, pointed at my svn repository and checking for commits. Any breaks in the build or unit tests result in immediate mails to the developers.
Is that the only reason why it’s better? No, there are far too many to mention here. Check out this list. But one of the main reasons I love it is that the developers are so responsive. I’ve been testing the 1.1.x beta versions for a while, and every time I try a new version and I find a bug or think of some new feature, I only have to fire Jason or Daniel an email and the idea generally appears in the next version. So far they’ve added LDAP support, Jira linking, Fisheye linking and better installation/configuration for me. Well, I say me, but of course, it’s for everyone 
It’s a great example of a small company really listening to what their users have to say and acting on it quickly. Kinda like open source no? Did I mention you can get open source or small team licenses too? Genious!
