Semergence

SwitchTower progress has a very nice tip for SwitchTower and a different username for subversion than the currently logged in user. Normally, SwitchTower will use the username of whoever is running the script. However, this may not always be what you want. In our environment, we have a single account used for all deployment tasks.

>Another hack to allow different user/pass for SVN access than for SSH access:
>
>set :repository ”—username user ––password pass http://svn.example.com“

Hong Zhang’s Blog mentions that java.net is now hosting J2EE applications for free through LocalWeb. Here’s the quote that scares me:

> The actual deployment of an application is done by a small team of engineers from Sun.

Yikes. Even with all the deployment descriptors, it takes “a small team” to host and deploy a single J2EE application. There’s something wrong with that.

I’ve always said that deploying Java applications is Java’s Achilles Heel. The LAMP community mocks Java not necessarily because the language is more verbose, but because it’s so dang hard to deploy the applications. Compare with PHP, which is as easy as editing the file and then hitting reload in your browser. That’s nearly impossible with a full J2EE application. So many libraries have memory leaks that play havoc with classloaders that a full application server restart is required.

In any case, this is one of the main reasons I’ve been moving to Rails. I can deploy an application in no time (especially when using SwitchTower).

SwitchTower is a set of scripts to automate application deployments for Ruby on Rails applications. For anyone who knows the pain of deploying and upgrading many applications, this is heaven sent. At a previous job we spent close to 25% of our time deploying and redeploying applications.

> SwitchTower is a standalone utility that can also integrate nicely with Rails. You simply provide SwitchTower with a deployment “recipe” that describes your various servers and their roles, and voila! You magically have single-command deployment. It even allows you to roll a bad version out of production and revert back to the previous release.

Question now is, can this even be done in the Java world? Even if it could, would it ever take hold? I almost think that a common deploy script and procedure would not be widely accepted in the Java world, because of the mentality of the common Java developer. A Java developer wants to built it himself (see the insane number of web frameworks out there for evidence of that). Of course, one size doesn’t fit all, but in the limited scope of web applications, one size fits most.