Phurnace, an 18-month old startup founded by veterans of Vignette, Documentum, and Siebel, is now in public launch with the third version of its automated Java deployment product. It isolates different aspects of the problem, taking a loosely-coupled approach that separates several key pieces.
They include the what, which pertains to the reference configuration files that are specific to the application, the where, which represents the target servers for which they are to be deployed on, and the how, which pertains to the environmental specific, such as how clustering or failover are configured. Sand it also includes metadata referring to all the interdependencies.
Phurnace’s approach is based on the notion that in any server side Java deployment, there are bound to be multiple moving parts. And any time one of the pieces is changed, the configuration can get thrown out of whack.
Traditionally, deploying Java applications is either done manually or through automated low-level scripts. Obviously, given the complexity of elements involved in a J2EE installation, there are many places where things can wrong, and many times they often do. Often times, conducting root cause analysis to pinpoint the source of errors or changes can be akin to searching for a needle in a haystack.
By isolating the key moving parts and managing configurations of those elements in a database, Phurnace enables you to isolate the impacts of change and make those changes easier to identify. For instance, when a server is physically swapped, or an additional instance of a Java application or MySQL database is installed, the changes are confined accordingly to the particular element. The kind of loose coupling between the different elements of Java deployment suggests an approach that is very similar in principle to SOA, although the tool is not specifically designed as a service-oriented architecture itself.
The company claims that its approach can help reduce configuration-related defects up to 95%, and installation time by almost a similar magnitude.
For now, Phurnace is available for the latest couple versions of IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic. Next month, it will add JBoss and the Tomcat servlet container, followed by Oracle Application Server and SAP NetWeaver in Q1 of next year.
Our View
You’d think that somebody would have thought of this before. It’s no secret that J2EE and Java EE are darn complex, in large part because the Java platform handles so much of the plumbing, and because it has until now been the platform of choice for highly complex deployments that spread beyond the Windows platform.
What’s interesting is that one piece of the problem, deployment descriptors, was addressed several years ago through the Java Community Process. By standardizing the syntax for Java configurations, it eliminated one of the major sources of incompatibility between different J2EE servers (don’t worry, there are many more). But with descriptor syntax standardized, it is surprising that no tooling vendor has yet addressed how to manage all this across multiple Java platforms.
