Initial "Duke's Bank" JBoss demonstration application posted

One of the key ways that ControlTier's commercial activities directly benefit our Open Source community is via the Solution Libraries maintained at the Moduleforge project.

The experience gained implementing solutions for our commercial customers is made generally available via these libraries, making Moduleforge the means of kick-starting projects by supplementing the base types/modules distributed with the ControlTier framework.

One example of these libraries is "Elements" - a "grab bag" of modules largely concerned with automating the Java server application build and deployment life-cycle with modules covering continuous integration with CruiseControl, builders such as Ant and Maven, application servers such as Tomcat and JBoss, and associated services such as Apache web server and Apache MQ.

There's plenty of work left to extend the scope of Elements to cover a broader set of technologies as well as improve the standard of the solution libraries documentation.

We made a solid step in the right direction this week by releasing notes on using the library to build and deploy Sun's "Duke's Bank" sample application (from their J2EE 1.4 Tutorial) to JBoss 4.0.3SP1, thus providing a clear example to JBoss users of the benefits of using ControlTier.

The plan is to make "Duke's Bank" the primary sample application of a major revision of Elements dubbed the "Java Server Solution Library" that we're preparing ahead of next month's SaasSCon in Santa Clara.

Anthony Shortland.

anthony@controltier.com

Upgrading to ControlTier 3.1-rc2

For those of you who are upgrading an existing ControlTier installation, Anthony has posted a set of tips on the mailing list to ensure things go smoothly.

You can find them here:
http://groups.google.com/group/controltier/browse_thread/thread/40fbdf43139d2f3c?hl=en

If you aren't already subscribed to the mailing list (run by google groups), I suggest doing so. Its a timely source of information and the quickest way to communicate with project developers.

ControlTier 3.1-rc2 Released

Download it here: http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=151079

What's New since 3.1-rc1:

A Maven 2 plugin was created for antdepo, and a Maven archetype was created to support using maven to build a ControlTier Library Jar.

Changes since 3.1-rc1:

bugfix: Change-Dependencies command used by Updaters now correctly allows multiple package files with the same type and version when allowMultiples is true, but the dependency constraints between the deployment and its packages is not exactly specified.

bugfix: a bug preventing Transform creation was fixed.

Installer:

Improve ability to do 'upgrade' installations.

Base types:

Builder repoImport command now supports a 'separator' cli option, allowing the separator between package base and version to be something other than the default of a hyphen character '-'. Also added as an attribute named 'packageSeparator' which can be set with an appropriate Setting subtype. Some typo fixes.

Builder Subversion support improved: scmModule parameter was not being used in some cases.

ProjectBuilder: The meaning of the 'basedir' commmand-line flag was changed to be the top-level directory containing the modules directory.

ATG Commerce Solution Library 1.3 update posted to ModuleForge

One of the key lines of business for ControlTier is delivering automated provisioning solutions for ATG based e-commerce sites. Over the last three years we've been building up best-practice implementation skills that we've distilled into a freely available integrated solution library. 

I'm happy to announce that we've just posted a significant update to version 1.3 of our ATG Commerce Platform Solution Library to Moduleforge. This release consolidates the results of a good six months work focussing on JBoss based ATG build and deployment management with a number of key customers including ATG On-Demand Hosting Services themselves.

The release includes detailed documentation on how to build a demonstration code and data provisioning solution based on the Pioneer Cycling sample application running on JBoss, Solid and Linux. This demonstration is a solid starting point for anyone interested reviewing the functionality of our Solution Library; in fact, our consultants build on the Solution Library as the foundation for building custom solutions to meet our clients' site-specific requirements.

Please go ahead and post feedback on the release here or at our main discussion group.

Thanks,

Anthony Shortland,

ControlTier Software, Inc.