My feeling is that this would be a major addition to Maven and would still be missing a lot of stuff. It looks more like a CMS with some rules and some processes that construct a zip or an installer. You need a lot of flexibility in defining how assets are assembled into the required artifact.

Of course, one could extend Maven but it would almost be a complete rewrite.

I think that we would be better served by looking at what Maven does well and specifying a downstream process that incorporates the ideas that you identified below but into a system that focuses on deployment.

It probably will attract a different type of person to the project.
I would expect that the Maven team is heavily weighted towards developers as committers.

The design and implementation of this new facility should be driven by system administrators and infrastructure support types who spend their days making applications run in production.


Ron





On 01/03/2013 8:06 PM, Eric Kolotyluk wrote:
Thanks for the pointers Stephen,...

http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Chef+Basics

https://puppetlabs.com/puppet/what-is-puppet/

Ron,...

Yes, I remember that deployment was outside the scope of Maven, but one of the things I like about Maven is the repository concept. I was advocating extending this concept from the development realm to the deployment realm sort of the way Microsoft's Global Assembly Cache (GAC) works, but for open-source artifacts. In particular, we could leverage existing technology and tools such as Maven, Nexus, Maven Central, etc.

For example, in terms of bootstrapping, you might have a simple open-source installer the checks to see if there exists a local system or network GAR (Global Artifact Repository), and if not, creates one. Then it follows an embedded script, or remote script via URI, to start populating the GAR with the artifacts needed. Finally, when it starts deploying actual applications and services, it can simply build a classpath by referencing locations in the GAR.

I was installing Akka recently, and it seemed to be doing something similar to what I was looking for. There was a small bootstrap installers, that just kept pulling more and more stuff in.

I have a project that is Maven based, and every time I setup my development environment on a new system, I am simply amazed while I watch Maven download hundreds of artifacts, and then it just builds my project. I would like to have this kind of awesome experience in production deployment tools.

Cheers, Eric

On 2013-03-01 2:07 PM, Ron Wheeler wrote:
On 01/03/2013 4:26 PM, Eric Kolotyluk wrote:
A while back we had some interesting discussions on using Maven, or
maven-like technology for deploying production software. I was wondering if
anything new has been happening since then.

Basically what I am hoping to see is a generic installer framework that
bootstraps deployment of a production system or service the way Maven
bootstraps a development environment.

Can anyone point me to anything happening on that front?

Cheers, Eric

My recollection of the conversation is that deployment is outside the scope of Maven and there are other tools that approach this from a more effective base functionality. Maven works best at giving you 1 artifact for a project whereas deployment needs to be able to generate a whole set of artifacts based on configurations that include
- software artifacts
- configuration files
- branding
- documentation
- release notes
- license agreements
- installer
each of which may have to be customized for each client or each deployment architecture(OS, database, etc.) or each deployment environment(production, test, QA) .


Ron



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Artifact Software Inc
email: rwhee...@artifact-software.com
skype: ronaldmwheeler
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