Overview of the Solution Development Environment

You can use the provisioning system to build system configuration, service provisioning, and application deployment solutions. At a very high level, you follow this simple process:

1. Build a set of components. This step might involve any of the following sub-tasks:

   1. Defining application-specific component types

   2. Naming each component

   3. Assigning a component type to each component

   4. Identifying any resources, such as source files and directories, that a component needs

   5. Defining specific tasks, or controls, for that component

2. Create a plan to direct the deployment of the components. Each plan includes the following information:

   1. A list of components

   2. A sequence in which the components are to run

   3. A list of any variables that the components need

   4. A set of target hosts, defined in the <hostSet> element, to which the components should be deployed

3. Create a plug-in that enables others to use the components and plans that you developed for a given platform or application. This task involves four main sub-tasks:

   1. Installing the sps-compSDK.jar file on your development system

   2. Developing a model for your plug-in, identifying how you plan to identify the various objects that make up the application that you want to deploy with your plug-in

   3. Developing the XML schema that identifies the application objects as components and resources, and defines the necessary variables for your application

   4. Creating an XML plan to perform specific deployment tasks, such as installing, uninstalling, and starting and stopping the application

   5. Including execNative steps in your components and plans to run native OS commands with your plug-in

   6. Including execJava steps in your components and plans to execute Java code when you deploy your plug-in

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      Note –

      If you need to use Java to develop your plug-in, use the NetBeans product. For more information, see http://www.netbeans.org/.

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   7. Enabling plug-in users to browse and create components from a remote system with the BrowserNode and ComponentExporter Java classes

   8. Developing a custom user interface for your plug-in to enable other SPS users to access your plug-in through the SPS browser user interface

   9. Packaging the components, plans, resources, and plug-in definition files, as a JAR file for delivery to other N1 SPS users