Software Engineering Institute

Construction/deployment scripts direct the compilation of sources to executables and the installation of those executables. This report details the construction/deployment scripts developed at the Software Engineering Institute for the GEE project. GEE, a Generic Enterprise Ensemble, is a prototypical three-tier information system incorporating a number of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products. The scripts for GEE were challenging because we wanted a self-contained package of scripts and source files from which the system could be built and deployed either by us at our site or by customers at their sites. The COTS products we used—Java, an Oracle database, the Visibroker implementation of CORBA (the Common Object Request Broker Architecture), and the Netscape Web browser and server—added challenges in installation, version change, process initiation, and communication rendezvous. This report describes the challenges and how our solutions exploited the principles of "Repeat not" and "Delay binding." Lessons learned are reported elsewhere.