SwitchTower: Automating Application Deployment

SwitchTower is a set of scripts to automate application deployments for Ruby on Rails applications. For anyone who knows the pain of deploying and upgrading many applications, this is heaven sent. At a previous job we spent close to 25% of our time deploying and redeploying applications.

> SwitchTower is a standalone utility that can also integrate nicely with Rails. You simply provide SwitchTower with a deployment “recipe” that describes your various servers and their roles, and voila! You magically have single-command deployment. It even allows you to roll a bad version out of production and revert back to the previous release.

Question now is, can this even be done in the Java world? Even if it could, would it ever take hold? I almost think that a common deploy script and procedure would not be widely accepted in the Java world, because of the mentality of the common Java developer. A Java developer wants to built it himself (see the insane number of web frameworks out there for evidence of that). Of course, one size doesn't fit all, but in the limited scope of web applications, one size fits most.

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