Fabian, This is the $1,000,000 question, quite literally. I happen to think that "deployment" -- a term often considered by engineers only at the very end of their project -- is more likely close to 50% of their work effort. I've never seen any real-life project for real people (other than some open source library released to a few geeks) that doesn't have serious and expensive deployment challenges.
Though Tim is apologizing for his elaborate answer, if anything it's too simplistic: this is an enormous challenge that can't be solved in a simple email. If you wait for Jerome's Restlet book, it will offer you quite a bit of advice on deployment! From what I read in the early version, it's not a small chapter, and it still only scraped the surface. JEE is one way to go: there are big, complicated products out there (JBoss) that implement deployment standards in complex ways that have proven themselves in many enterprises. People also seem to like adding Maven, OSGi and other technologies in their deployments, trying to integrate development with deployment. Perhaps a developer's pipe dream? I'm a consultant who has left the "enterprise" behind, and see a lot of my clients are trying to move away from this old, heavy term and think in more agile ways. I love Restlet and can't think of a better way to develop internet/intranet applications right now, in any language and on any platform. Which is why I decided to develop a container for Restlet applications that is based on Restlet and not JEE, and is more oriented towards agile than the enterprise: http://threecrickets.com/prudence/ It started pretty much like Tim: I was "rolling my own" until I realized that I can't keep rolling my own for every new client without exhausting myself, and that other people could benefit and help me in my work. Viva open source! -Tal ------------------------------------------------------ http://restlet.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=4447&dsMessageId=2747769
