Hi All, I've noticed a steady amount of questions on the list that are about using Ant "beyond the build" for tasks like application deployment or systems administration. It seems that many of questions are around the trickiness of dispatching commands to various remote machines (essentially doing what is just as painful to do with shell scripts), as well as a lack of support from a domain-specific framework.
I'm an old hand at using Ant for build automation, but I often would run into issues when I wanted to use those Ant skills to deploy the builds or perform prerequisite systems administration steps. These recurring hurdles motivated me to build a tool to help fill the gaps. The last few months I've been developing a new Sourceforge project called ctl-dispatch (CTL for short). CTL's goal is to provide a toolset and framework that's geared to automating application deployment tasks and provide an infrastructure where you can define and execute deployment and operation recipes. (CTL project home page: http://ctl.controltier.org ) (Sourceforge project home page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ctl-dispatch/) The basic CTL concept is that it provides a "Control Dispatcher" that handles the network dispatching for you so you can focus on the actual task-specific steps of your deployment process. CTL comes with pre-built cross-platform utilities so you don't have to script actions like file distribution or process and port checking. You can also write your own custom recipes (called modules) and share them with others in your organization. Custom modules are defined in XML file and your procedures can be specified in Ant or an alternative scripting language (eg, groovy, jruby, Perl, Python, *nix shell, Windows batch, etc). CTL documents a growing list cookbook examples that show you how to solve a number of common problems like file distribution, process management, parallel execution of management tasks, and error handling. I'll be continually expand the cookbook as the project evolves. (CTL cookbook: http://ctl.controltier.org/ant/cookbook/index.html ) With CTL, Ant is a first class citizen all the way. First, Ant is one of the core components on which CTL is built. Secondly, you can call CTL and CTL's utilities directly from your existing Ant build files or, if you want, you can create your own custom CTL modules by dropping your Ant code directly into a CTL module definition file. (See for CTL-For-Ant users: http://ctl.controltier.com/ant/index.html ) CTL is licensed under the The Apache License 2.0 and is currently being used by the consulting side of my company, ControlTier, in a number of our client projects. It's a new project but we've taken it on the road and have started getting lots of great feedback we've already started incorporating into the snapshot releases. I'd love to hear feedback or suggestions from the Ant community. And if you're going to JavaOne stop by and say hello. I'll be hanging out at the ControlTier booth. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/CTL%3A-New-Ant-friendly-deployment-and-administration-tool-tp16951542p16951542.html Sent from the Ant - Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
