Its aim is to make sure that all the projects are compatible, at both the API level and in terms of functionality matching specifications.

Gump was created by Sam Ruby, based on his experience in the Perl community.

Gump can build shell script, Ant and Maven 1 projects, setting up the classpath appropriately.

Ant and Maven 1 have special hooks built in them to give Gump complete control of the classpaths used to build and test the applications.

If a build on Gump is successful, a report is placed on the site, and all projects that declare themselves dependencies are eligible to be built.