Understanding USoft Delivery Manager

📄️ Introducing USoft Delivery Manager

When you develop rules-based applications in the USoft platform, you don't just use a single computer. The need naturally arises to have different environments for different purposes: development, test, acceptance, production, laboratory, demo, training, separate locations for modular development...

📄️ Release management: Flag for release phase

When you are developing new functionality in your USoft application, or when you are fixing bugs, it's not enough to simply make changes and expect that they will be perfectly released at some later time.

📄️ Release management: Release phase

Release is the operation of collecting all the deliverables that constitute a new version of your USoft application. You collect these from one or more development machines (the source environment) in preparation for delivering these to target machines.

📄️ Release trees

A release tree is a folder on a file system that contains releases produced by an instance of Delivery Manager. This is the only place where this Delivery Manager writes to: it is a hatch that is the only point through which deliverables are passed to target machines.

📄️ Release properties

Each release in Delivery Manager has a set of release properties. To view properties of the current, select Release, Current Release from the menu.

📄️ Release management: Deliver phase

Deliver is the operation of physically bringing new software to a target machine. USoft Delivery Manager encourages you to deliver by applying the hatch principle.

📄️ Release management: Configure phase

To configure is to make an arrangement of interdependent hardware and software components on a given system (computer, machine).

📄️ Configuration by variable substitution

This technique is about target variables and not source variables. In other words, it is about deploy-time and not release-time replacement of the variable placeholder by an actual value.

📄️ Configuration by XSL transformation

USoft Delivery Manager facilitates the configuration of XML deliverables through the use of XSLT 1.0 transformations.

📄️ Configuration example 1

In this example, different machines have different installation directories where the released application flatfiles must be deployed. The example shows how to configure these machine-specific installation directories.

📄️ Configuration example 2

This example shows configuration of machine-specific access rights for administrator users ('super users') per computer.

📄️ Configuration example 3

This example shows how to perform a merge of source-side and target-side server properties when you deploy a Server defined in USoft Service Definer. When the server is deployed on a specific target machine, it will have a list of properties that combines: