Deploying applications in production

Question

Hi
Like to get some opinion/advise on deploying applications to production.
we develop applications in WSAD.After unit testing in studio Export the .ear to the Q/A system , if everything works good just copy the .ear to production.
What are the standard practices to do these . Is there any s/w packages available which does this and have an audit trail of when and what is moved.
Does anyone here use any software for this.
Moreover is it better to deploy application as a single .ear/.war or is it better to have an exploded format.
The advantage of exploded format is you need to move only waht is changed.
TIA for you comments.

Answer 1

Here's the deployment scheme I last used:
Install files from test to staging machine, try it out. Then run "rsync" to copy to production cluster. "rsync" makes a remote directory tree identical to a master tree, based on file time stamps and optionally hashes.
That's it. No latest buzz words and TLAs, but does the job.
Files were files, not zipped. I like being able to more/grep/vi my config files and html's without unzipping and re-zipping. When you want to store files, the Unix file system is a pretty darn good tool for it.
What I never got around to implementing was change auditing. Possible fixes: save rsync's output to a file (rsync | tee). And/or run a version control checkin script for the whole tree while running the rsync. And/or run the checkin every 15 minutes from cron; normally nothing has been changed, so the checkin is a no-op.