This chapter, "Build and Deploy Procedures" is excerpted from the new book, IBM WebSphere: Deployment and Advanced Configuration, authored by Roland Barcia, Bill Hines, Tom Alcott and Keys Botzum. ? International Business Machines Corporation 2005. ISBN 0-13-146862-6. To learn more, www.phptr.com/title/0131468626.
In the last chapter, we provided you with a quick start to WebSphere Application Server (WAS) by configuring and deploying the Personal Trade System. The deployment was simple and straightforward, using the WAS administrative console to do most of the work. With small applications, this approach is often sufficient. However, for most J2EE applications, deployment requires much more planning and process. In fact, the entire application lifecycle requires rigorous processes.
In this chapter, we will focus on three closely related areas: builds, deployment, and server configuration. We will start by discussing some key reasons why rigor is important and then define some terminology that we'll be using for the rest of the chapter. Then we'll identify three common approaches to build and deploy. Following that, we will focus on automation.
Automation of the build and deploy steps can reduce the amount of effort required to produce and then deploy an application. Automation can also reduce the likelihood of human error-not an insignificant concern in large and complex projects. In addition to automating the assembly and building of applications, we will offer advice on how to automate server configuration.
Procedures Matter
The enterprise development model is more complex than traditional small application development-code must be written, compiled, assembled, and then deployed (presumably with some testing included). That is, after the code is compiled, the application must be assembled from a set of modules into a single application EAR. In addition, deployment includes the implicit concept of "binding," which is taking a built application and binding its contents to the target runtime environment. These two concepts are very powerful and give applications a great deal of flexibility, but they do require additional discipline. Build and deploy in these situations are core functions that must be carefully managed like anything else.Setting up high-quality procedures correctly can set the tone for the rest of the project.
In our experience, failing to develop solid procedures often will cause projects to experience serious problems and occasionally will result in project failure. In this book, we are assuming a rigorous approach to development, roughly like this:
- Developers write code following high-quality software engineering principles. This includes a configuration management system for their source code and other artifacts.
- Developers execute unit tests against their code before checking it into the repository.
- Code is built into a complete system following a well-defined procedure.
- Code is deployed to a runtime environment (an actual WAS instance) following some well-defined procedure.
