What is Jenkins and its features ?

What is Jenkins ?

• Open source tool to perform continuous integration 
• monitors a version control system and if changes occurs to start and monitor a build system (for example Apache Ant or Maven)  
• monitors the whole build process and provide reporting functionality and notification functionality to report success or errors.
• It can be extended by additional plug-ins, e.g. for building and testing applications. 

Features of Jenkins

• Easy install 
  Just deploy jenkins.war in a servlet container. No additional install, no database.

• Easy configuration
  Jenkins can be configured entirely from its friendly web GUI with extensive on-the-fly error checks and inline help.

• Change set support
  Jenkins can generate a list of changes made into the build from Subversion/CVS.

• Permanent links
  Jenkins gives you clean readable URLs for most of its pages, including some permalinks like "latest build"/"latest successful build", so that they can be easily linked from elsewhere.

• e-mail integration
  Get real-time notifications on failures.

• After-the-fact tagging
  Builds can be tagged long after builds are completed.

• JUnit / TestNG test reporting
  JUnit test reports can be tabulated, summarized, and displayed with history information, such as when it started breaking, etc.
  
  History trend is plotted into a graph.

• Distributed builds
  Jenkins can distribute build/test loads to multiple computers. This lets you get the most out of those idle workstations sitting beneath developers' desks.

• File fingerprinting
  Jenkins can keep track of which build produced which jars, and which build is using which version of jars, and so on. 
  
  This works even for jars that are produced outside Jenkins, and is ideal for projects to track dependency.

• Plugin support
  Jenkins can be extended via 3rd party plugins. You can write plugins to make Jenkins support tools/processes that your team uses.