General Deployement Questions...

[Ken Pullin]

Just a general deployment question...
How do most people deploy applications to Websphere. Do most people use Ant to compile the java files and build the war and ear files and then run it through the AAT tool? Or is there a bigger and better way to do it?
Thanks

[Jose Velarde]

Originally posted by Ken Pullin:
How do most people deploy applications to Websphere.

In our development environment, the developers just give the .ear file (that was generated in WSAD) and the deployment person will simply deploy it to WAS.

Do most people use Ant to compile the java files and build the war and ear files and then run it through the AAT tool? Or is there a bigger and better way to do it?

If you already built the .ear thru ANT, why would you want to run it through the AAT tool? AAT is just a graphical user interface for constructing an .ear file.

[Ken Pullin]

Jose
I just worded my question wrong about the .ear file. What I really wanted to ask is do people build the ear file from within WSAD or use a tool like Ant to generate the ear file to be deployed on Websphere. It seems very error prone to build your .ear file from within WSAD. I would think you would want to build your code after you've pulled it from a source code repository and not WSAD.

[dong yao]

WSAD can integrate with ClearCase or CVS, so it is possible to directly check out the source code through WSA and build it by WSAD. I am not sure who are doing that in real world.

[Ken Pullin]

yeah
we integrate StarTeam into WSAD, just doesn't seem like the best way to build your production application. For testing it would be ok, but for production it doesn't seem very feasible.

[Kyle Brown]

Originally posted by Jose Velarde:

If you already built the .ear thru ANT, why would you want to run it through the AAT tool? AAT is just a graphical user interface for constructing an .ear file.

Nope. AAT does more. In particular it will add the "IBM extension" XML files. WSAD adds these directly, but otherwise you'll need to either hand-code them or let AAT use them.
Kyle

[Ken Pullin]

Kyle
What do you suggest is the best practice when it comes to deploying web applications to a production environment? In my case, we are doing our testing in an NT environment, but will deploy our production app on the z/OS platform with version 4.
I'm mainly looking for a "Most people use Ant to compile with and then use AAT" or "Most people do it this way ....."
Thanks

[Jose Velarde]

Originally posted by Kyle Brown:
Nope. AAT does more. In particular it will add the "IBM extension" XML files. WSAD adds these directly, but otherwise you'll need to either hand-code them or let AAT use them.
Kyle

You're right! I totally forgot about IBM Extensions and Bindings

[Kyle Brown]

Originally posted by Ken Pullin:
Kyle
What do you suggest is the best practice when it comes to deploying web applications to a production environment? In my case, we are doing our testing in an NT environment, but will deploy our production app on the z/OS platform with version 4.
I'm mainly looking for a "Most people use Ant to compile with and then use AAT" or "Most people do it this way ....."
Thanks

I wouldn't necessarily call it a best practice, but most of the IBM customers do end up using ANT (and possibly AAT) to build their J2EE components. However, this is because they often have tools that aren't integrated into Eclipse for one reason or another. When your team is all using WSAD/Eclipse and a supported team programming tool, then I believe there's no reason to use ANT.
Kyle

[Patrick Finnegan]

Most popular method of deployment is ANT headless build with WSAD and then WSCP or XML import of .ear into WebSphere. WebSphere Administrators may wish to deploy .ear over multiple JVMs, assign security roles to several different user groups, assign web modules to multiple virtual hosts etc so scripted .ear deployment is essential.

[Ken Pullin]

The only problem I have with deployment from WSAD using Ant or not is that this may be a role assigned to a non-developer. I do not want my Build Person having to check code out of our source code repository, import it into WSAD and then do a build. I would rather that person check the code out, do a build using ANT, and then assemble it with AAT.
Bringing a development tool into play when you are doing production builds does not seem like the wisest thing to do.
Am I missing something here? I understand it's easy to deploy from WSAD, but maybe to dev, not prod.