Managing production deployment of Java applications: overcome the complex challenge of handling various releases.(Product Spotlight)

Companies that have adopted WebSphere as their enterprise development platform are creating business-critical production applications. These projects include new, stand-alone solutions and modernized front ends for legacy applications and are being deployed to any eServer platform that supports IBM WebSphere Application Server.

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Development teams and production control personnel are facing complex challenges. Production deployment processes and tools in this area have not matured as they have in legacy iSeries and zSeries environments. There is a need to reliably manage various releases of applications that often contain thousands of source members. Management needs a repeatable, dependable process, while developers need to be free to do their job without being burdened by external tools.

Enterprises need answers to these questions:

* How can a project team develop new functionality while providing maintenance for the production version?

* How can managers guarantee that absolutely no unplanned or unwanted changes are introduced into a production application when fixes are required?

* How can a WebSphere development team reduce the amount of time spent on manual source code merging (which can destabilize the application) and unproductive Ant makefile scripting?

* How can any WebSphere team member rebuild the application, on any machine, exactly the way it exists today?

A solution should enable production deployment teams to:

* Reliably reproduce the exact set of source code for any version of a production application …