Playing DevOps with SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS) is about making the life easier for the whole team who is or will be in charge of an application and this by providing helper tools from the project initiation till the operation of the application.
With the Rational Application Developer (RAD), you can integrate the two services provided by SCAS. By installing the RTC Client Plugin you can interact with the Collaborative LifeCycle Management Service (CLMS) and for example version your code from RAD to CLMS or developers can manage the defects assigned to them.
RAD also provides a plugin to manage Workload Service (WS) pattern. The developer will be able to deploy the pattern and upload new version of his application in the running pattern. The application can be a WebApp or an OSGi component.
CLMS and WS are to two based services of SCAS.
Some time, small companies or start-up have limited budget to spend in development, test and production environment and thus in order to reduce the cost they use open-sources or free products on one side and prefer Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) solution rather then investing capital in servers, softwares and maintenance on the other hand. Also large companies, in the economical context, would like to turn the CAPEX to OPEX.
For such companies, the SmartCloud Application Services is the best feet because you can order CLMS and WS in a PAYG mode and thus achieve they financial goal.
As SCAS can be deploy in minutes, it will drastically speed-up the go to market which is very important either for large companies and start-ups.
In the Java playground, the Eclipse platform is one of the most common platform which be used for free.
Also, the RTC client plugin is available for Free under certain condition, please check here the license scheme and can be installed on Eclipse.
Blog on How to install Rational Team Concert Plugin for SmartCloud Application CLMS?
Now, I created an Eclipse plugin called “SCAWS pattern deployer” which allows you to deploy SCAWS pattern from your favorite Eclipse platform. You will be not only able to deploy pattern but also push new version of your application build in Eclipse to a running pattern. The plugin can also build a zip/jar/war/ear file based on a directory and automatically push it as an asset for your running pattern. Then the plugin is not limited to WebApp application but it can manage any type of application because the plugin is designed to be as much as possible generic, meaning it can push any type of file or zipped directory to a running pattern.
The “SCAWS pattern deployer” Eclipse plugin is available free of charge and AS-IS-WITH-NO-WARRANTY in the SmartCloud Enterprise Asset Catalog (follow the link “SCAWS pattern deployer”: SCE account is required).
The asset contains the plugin documentation (Installation/Usage) and the plugin repository site archive itself.
If you are looking for a supported product or a fully integrated environment for J2EE, please investigate Rational Application Developer which provides out of the box an integrated plugin, the Workload Deployer. For more information: www.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/application/