Build and release management

Hi all,

I’m currently investigating the deceivingly simple task of moving webMethods artifacts from a source environment to a target environment.

Now, although Deployer is supposed to take care of this, it leaves much to be desired in terms of versioning and tracking the builds and releases. It also doesn’t integrate with any configuration management tool.

We currently version control all our IS packages (the source code, not the binary package exports). To deploy a package to another environment, we execute a script that takes a given subversion revision number of a package, tags the package in subversion and adds the version number to the package before it deploys it to the target. This gives important traceability in terms of package versions on different environments. So far so good. The solution works very well for single package releases.

The problem is that the artifacts of a release can be spread over multiple webMethods components, such as IS, TN, PRT/TaskEngine/MWS, Infravio X-Registry/CentraSite, and so on. These components all have different ways of storing and managing their code or data.

I’m curious to know how the rest of you handle this in your setup. How do you build and package your releases? How do you keep track of what goes where?

FYI, we’re currently running wM 6.5 and 7.1.

We use a free tool called File safe. We also do versioning at the IS package level. We are, however, looking to going toward Cross Vista. I met with another company who uses it and it looks like it might give the version tracking we desire.

http://www.crossvista.com/