Continuous integration notification, the other way.

My team use Hudson for continuous integration it used to send mail to whoever commit.
Recently our handsome sysadmin decided that this is an abuse of the system so this option was blocked.

As a result i noticed from time to time that the build was broken for some time and i didn't love it very much, I assume no one love it.
I decided to improvise, Hudson  have plugin to gtalk so I created a gmail account for the builder and try this plugin.

Luck was not with me, the builder located in the lab on a private network so the plugin didn't worked.
However, Hudson have an option to send UDP package to a configured address as a result of a job state changed (job start, success or failed). so I configure Hudson to send my Linux machine notification about the build state.

Using Hudson REST API I was able to get all the missing information to send the needed data to the users who committed.
Since my machine connected to the web it was possible to start gtalk conversation quickly I wrote a Java program that send the users gtalk message using smack.
The result was beautiful the builder gtalk user start a conversation with the users that committed and report the build status.

Now for the last part, after I add an image to the gtalk user I was kind of attached to him, I was thinking it would be nice to talk with him from time to time, and then I remembered of my old friends from the university Eliza and Emacs Doctor.

The result is here: builder.webspace@gmail.com 
Here is a sample of our conversation

Just give it a try, open gtalk and chat with builder.webspace@gmail.com .
Barak.