Goals and drivers
- Same artifact (primary artifact, can have multiple distribution artifacts) should be deployed to all environments, build-time configuration is unacceptable.
- The number of manual steps required to deploy should be kept at a bare minimum. => minimize the number of required settings + automate as much as possible
- System administrators need to monitor and tweak the application to best utilize the production environment.
- Support multiple environments (e.g test, pre-prod and production)
Available strategies
There are two approaches when generating deployment archives/packages; create native installation packages that integrate closely with the operating system or try to create one generic package that supports multiple platforms. Java can be run on any platform, so a single deployment package that can be used on all platforms would be nice. The straight-forward approach is to generate an archive (e.g. zip or tar.gz) and add start and stop scripts for multiple platforms. Some manual steps can be avoided by using Deploy application with Java Network Launching Protocol (JNLP) for deployment, but JNLP is designed for client applications and is not well-suited 24/7 server applications as the support for running the application as a service/daemon is poor.
See following tables for an overview:
| Archive | JNLP | Native installation packages | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform independent |  |
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| Simple to use. | |
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| Simple to setup. | |
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| Tool support for setting it up as a service/daemon | |
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| Tool support for pre and post installation scripts. | |
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| Tool support for removing the application | |
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| Built-in distribution mechanism | |
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| Built-in auto-upgrade mechanism | |
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| Method known by both developers and system administrators | |
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Read more
Other Resources
Reference to other people that might think similar to us, but not quite.
Automated Deployment Resources