Cooling the Hell of Distributed Applications’ Deployment

The deployment of distributed applications has been mainly a manual task, despite of the proprietary solutions that already exist in the market. Due mainly to the heterogeneity of the operational environment and the software to be deployed, deployment is something that is usually done by writing installation and configuration scripts in an appropriate scripting language. With the wide acceptance of Enterprise Java Beans and the arrival of the CORBA 3.0’s Components, an extraordinary opportunity for automating the deployment process has emerged. This is the basis for this paper, in which we define the concept of deployment, present a list of assumptions that would enable the automation of the process and establish a list of requirements on the deployment process itself and on deployment means.