I think I've blogged about this before but Justin announced the release of AntFlow, a system automation tool based on Ant.
AntFlow builds upon Apache Ant to provide a new approach to simplifying system automation that uses pipelines of hot folders chained together to perform a given task. Using XML, AntFlow associates an automated task, such as data transfer, encryption, or XML processing with a directory on the local system. Whenever a file is copied or written into the hot folder, the associated task is executed and the file is moved to the next hot folder in the pipeline for further processing.
Here's a way I could use this today if I tried. Like a good build guru, our build process is completely scripted. I can pretty much press a button and end up with a WAR file with our application in it. This is done on a build box and we have two QA boxes and a staging box which need to be updated when the time comes. The updating part is really what isn't updated, mainly because I haven't written something to watch for the completion of the WAR file transfer from build box to server.
With AntFlow, I could set the transfer destination as the hot folder and then have my task.xml handle the rest of the installation process which is scripted. This is obviously a very simple idea but would save me time each day and that's all you can ask for when talking about a workflow system.
Posted by Josh at November 2, 2004 04:20 PM | TrackBack