Dev and Prod deployment

[doubledenim]

I'm at the final stages of releasing an application built on JBoss AS. And I'm just researching the best way to switch from development to production.

What I am thinking I will do is to have two seperately built WAR files, one for production, and one for deployment. And each of them have seperate property files and different Jndi bindings so they can be deployed along side each other on the same Application server.

Can anyone advise if this is a good/common approach and if there are any common practices in implementing this kind of thing?

[jaikiran]

What I am thinking I will do is to have two seperately built WAR files, one for production, and one for deployment. And each of them have seperate property files and different Jndi bindings so they can be deployed along side each other on the same Application server.

That would be too much of work and you could even end up messing up the production application's data (imagine pointing to the prod DB datasource in your dev application).

The question really is:

1) Do you want both the dev and the prod application on the same server? If not, then you can host it on a separate dev system (which is the most common way for such things).
2) Do you want them to be running simultaneously?

[doubledenim]

"jaikiran" wrote:


1) Do you want both the dev and the prod application on the same server? If not, then you can host it on a separate dev system (which is the most common way for such things).
2) Do you want them to be running simultaneously?

I guess I want them on the same server for financial reasons more than anything. Being a start up i don't really want to incur the cost of another server. I have a cheap server i could put it on but its almost unusable it is so poor.

I will need them to be able to run simultaneously as it is a work in progress and I really need a staging server.
In my method above i was actually going to create a seperate datasource and seperate db as well.

Another thing I need to consider, which is probably the most important as I will have to find a solution regardless. Is the fact that my production build will have to be slightly different from my dev. You see the application talks to 3rd party webservices. In dev these will be testing versions of the webservices and live versions for production, so I need some sophisticated way of switching between the two.

[jaikiran]

Going by what you mentioned, i guess you need multiple instances of the server on a single machine. See this http://www.jboss.org/community/docs/DOC-9384. One instance will be for dev and one for prod. Each of these instances can have its own set of applications/configurations and can be accessed through different URLs.