Necessity and Invention

The old saying goes “Necessity is the mother of invention.” This saying was proved true yesterday.

I was contacted by a developer eager to use our BundleWorks product to help manage their build and deployment process. There was one problem - they built their application on Windows and deployed to AIX. The deployment part wasn’t a problem since BundleWorks supports a variety of UNIX-based platforms, including AIX. But the Windows version of BundleWorks is not ready yet.

A thought came to me. A BundleWorks bundle is simply a set of directories and files in well-defined locations, very similar to a Java jar or war archive. With the proper changes to their current ant build script, this developer could produce a BundleWorks bundle without needing BundleWorks on their Windows machine.

The developer needed to make the following changes accomplish this:

1. Create BundleWorks action scripts to install and run their java application. These scripts ended up being a handful of lines long since they were able to rely on BundleWorks built-in functions.
2. Change their ant build.xml file to arrange their build output to match the layout of a BundleWorks bundle.
3. Use the ant echo task to write out a BundleWorks info file.
4. Use the ant zip task to create an archive for deployment.

Note that these steps are normally performed by the BundleWorks bundle command, so when BundleWorks is available for Windows, the developer’s ant script becomes simpler.

The developer made these changes, built a BundleWorks bundle for their application, and successfully deployed it to their AIX staging environment. Next week, they will deploy the application into their production environment.

The developer said they were eager to use BundleWorks to replace an error-prone upgrade process. Previously, they would deploy upgrades by manually copying new jar files to replace old ones, and they sometimes ran into trouble doing this. Using BundleWorks, the upgrade process became clean and safe, with an option to roll back if necessary.

The net result: one happy developer.