Moving our web application from a windows development environment to linux environment seamlessly

Question

I am trying to develop a web application on a windows machine using apache wicket, java, jquery etc. Apache wicket comes with an embedded jetty server. I am using eclipse as the IDE.

The application needs to access some resources like configuration files etc that are present on remote machine (linux server) to which we could ssh, once development is complete we would like to deploy this application on a tomcat server hosted on this linux server. How to move seamlessly from the windows development environment to the linux server deployment?

Right now we do the development by copying over the latest config files from the server, however this is error prone as it becomes difficult to keep track of the latest config files, this leads to unexpected behavior when the application is deployed.

Our team is located in India and our servers are located in US, mapping the config files and accessing them do not have good response times.

Answer 1

I understand you are trying to solve two key problems here

1. Syncing configuration files to between two locations
2. Deploying applications from development to production.

To answer your first question: There a number of sync tools that are available you can use to sync a bunch of directories to across multiple systems my favorite is rsync. [1]http://rsync.samba.org/examples.html

So you can use it to sync configuration files in your production linux server and a development linux server.

To answer your second question: I am assuming you are using some sort of version control system for your code,If so then you can use any of the continuous integration systems like jenkins to do an automated build for you and push the built project to the remote server once the build is successful.The good thing about using a continuous integration servers is once a developer commits the code it can automatically kick off new builds (if you configure it to do so) and you will have quick feedback on the status of your build and fix the issue.