Developing a Model

Before you build your plug-in solution, you need to do some planning and modeling work. The following questions indicate some common areas to consider:

• What is the expected environment in which you want this solution to be used? For example, operating system requirements, application version requirements, and so on.

• Do you need to account for any variable values, such as path names, when provisioning this platform or application?

• What files need to be deployed to the provisionable hosts to enable this platform or application to function? For example, configuration files.

• Do you need to define any new component types for this solution, or can you use the existing component types? Many simple solutions can use existing component types, such as system#file and system#directory. If necessary, however, you can define your own component types that extend the existing component types.

• Will a user need to browse for and create instances of a component from a remote system?

• What is the flow of tasks you need your users to be able to perform?

The following illustrates one possible modelling flow, based on the flow for deploying Java^TM 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) :

1. Deploy infrastructure.

   • Execute installer binaries to install infrastructure

   • Installs targetable components

2. Capture all application objects as components, such as the following objects:

   • Java Archive (JAR) files, Enterprise Archive (EAR) files, Web Archive (WAR) files, Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) files

   • JDBC connection and data sources

3. Create an “environment” component that contains environment settings, such as the following:

   • Java Virtual Machine (JVM) settings

   • Session management settings

4. Configure application/environment components

5. Deploy components into targetable components