Section: Software

Keywords : Component, Deployment, Middleware.

Fractal Deployment Framework

Participants : Nicolas Dolet, Areski Flissi, James Manley, Philippe Merle [ correspondant ] .

Fractal Deployment Framework (FDF) is a component-based software framework to facilitate the deployment of distributed applications on networked systems. FDF supports any kind of deployment activities like uploading, installing, configuring, starting, stopping and uninstalling any software. For that, FDF is composed of a high level deployment language, a library of deployment components, and a set of end-user tools.

The FDF language is a kind of high level scripting language allowing end-users to describe their deployments (i.e., hosts of the target system and software to deploy on them). This language relies on a library of deployment components wrapping various file transfer protocols (e.g., FTP, SCP), remote access protocols (e.g., TELNET, SSH), Unix and Windows shells, Internet-related notions (e.g., hostname, port, host), and software (e.g., middleware, services, daemons, application servers, application components). FDF also provides a graphical user interface allowing end-users to load their deployment descriptions, execute and manage them.

Currently, FDF supports the deployment of Java Runtime Environments (JRE), Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) application servers as JOnAS and JBoss, Java Business Integration (JBI) containers as PEtALS, OSGi gateways like OSCAR, and CORBA component-based application servers like OpenCCM. FDF has been successfully experimented for the deployment of OpenCCM middleware and CORBA component-based applications on one thousand nodes of Grid5000, the french grid infrastructure dedicated to computer science research.

FDF is designed with the ObjectWeb Fractal component model, and is implemented on top of its Java-based tools (Julia or AOKell, Fraclet, Fractal Explorer).

FDF is LGPL open source software available at http://gforge.inria.fr/projects/fdf .