Keeping track of all the projects emerging from this year’s Google Summer of Code is a tricky process at the best of times. With 1,212 proposals accepted for this year’s free and open source software summer coding project, you’d be forgiven for missing some fresh new takes from some prodigious talent.

One such example that we didn’t spot is a plugin from Ognjen Bubalo, who chose to merge the worlds of the Java code coverage tool JaCoCo and continuous integration server Jenkins. The result is the first plugin (to our knowledge) that allows the user to integrate the Java code coverage report into automated builds. This was often a big limitation for CI servers, with neither Hudson or Jenkins providing this option alone. You could get it into your build through some laborious workaround, but it felt unnatural and incohesive. With more than 300 plugins already appearing under the Jenkins banner, it’s a slight surprise that no one had thought to take this on before.

Through a little bit of ingenuity from Bubalo, Jenkins advocates can now use the OSGi bundle library to their heart’s content. The plugin itself is a fork of the Emma Jenkins plugin (Emma being the forerunner to Jacoco) and bares striking visual similarities when showing your Java code coverage across the project. Jenkins creator, Kohsuke Kawaguchi has given his seal of approval to the plugin, even contributing to the source code.

It’s a plugin that was greatly needed for the Java community, and getting the bare bones together was a big undertaking. Now it’s here (with two updates since Summer of Code began) this plugin has potential to go far, when generating coverage of Java unit tests. Why not give it a look at the Github home and the plugin page?