Automated Promotion Process

[Kyle Adams <ka...@gfs.com>]

I've seen lots of automated integration build tools out there
(Centipede, Anthill, Gump, CruiseControl, Maven), but I haven't seen
very many (any at all, actually) tools for promoting web applications
through various dev, test, and production environments.  Right now we
have an in-house system that's a mixture of dynamically generated Ant
buildfiles (based on Gump-like XML files) and some Perl scripts.

The buildfiles are responsible for extracting the deployment
descriptors out of an EAR, making the necessary changes to move to the
next environment, and then packaging everything back up again before
FTP'ing it to the new environment.  As part of the FTP'ing, it backs up
the old EAR and uses the serverdeploy tasks to do a hot deploy.  All the
developer has to do is specify which changes need to happen
(accomplished with the xmltask and propertyfile tasks) for a particular
environment (as described in an XML file based on Gump's workspace
file).

It's a fair amount of work to maintain this system, and I'd like to
replace it with an Ant-based open source system, but I've never heard of
anything like this out there.

So is there anyone out there addressing this need?

Kyle