Software developers create software. That’s somewhat natural. But what most software developers don't think about, is how this software is run in the end.
We (SSI Schaefer) have been facing challenges with deployment for years. SSI Schaefer is building large scale business applications based on the Eclipse RCP platform. These applications are installed on thousands of customer servers, and the client applications on even more customer client PCs. We absolutely need an easy, straight forward way to be able to package, transfer, install, configure, run and update these applications.
Also, over the years, other applications joined our ecosystem, so we need a solution to deploy those (technologically completely independent) applications as well.
We have created a solution that works for us, and we've made it completely independent of any of our software products – and we’ve made it open source! I want to use the opportunity to tell you about it, show you what it can achieve, why we think this is the greatest deployment tool ever!
Just to quickly give you some more buzzwords about BDeploy:
On-premises deployment tool, with plans to extend support also to Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
- Minimal data transfer and storage sizes due to hash-tree-based storage technology.
- Support for multiple on-premise nodes for server applications
- Support for client application configuration, deployment, update.
- Support for centralized management of multiple sites, with each multiple nodes.
- Support for versioned configuration files including online editing.
- Support for side-by-side installation of application versions to allow quick upgrade (and rollback in case of disaster).
- Integration into Eclipse to ease building products.
Is BDeploy interesting for you? Can it deploy your applications? Well, it can if:
- Your applications can be installed by simply placing it into any directory.
- Your applications can be configured by passing command line arguments.