What are good deployment and release strategies for a shared runtime environment?

Status Quo

For our customer we are developing some libraries and applications that run as "modules" within a larger application that is delivered as a internal Java Web Sta开发者_如何学Crt application. The customer maintains the infrastructure that this application is run on. The "server side" is made up of a few web services based on Axis2. Both parts are deployed to a single Tomcat instance as two separate web applications.

When we are releasing new versions of our artifacts, we just produce the necessary JAR files (e.g. ourapp-client.jar and ourapp-server.jar) and send them to our customer who in turn just drops them into the appropriate places and--if need be--restarts the Tomcat server.

Goals

We are currently Maven-izing all of our projects and in the future we also want to do our releases in a "Maven way". The main goal is to automate the release and deployment process on our side and make it less error prone and more reliable and comfortable on the client side.

Main problem

The tricky part is that our customer uses the same Tomcat web applications (Axis2 for the "server side" and the Web Start app) to include their self-developed modules into the application. So we cannot use the obvious solution and just deliver a fresh web app (WAR) that simply gets deployed into the server. That is why we are currently delivering single JAR files that are put "by hand" into the right location.

What strategies do you in general use for delivering your products to your customer? Does someone have had any experiences with a similar situation (i.e. shared runtime environment for 3rd party and self developed applications)?

The main goal is to automate the release and deployment process on our side and make it less error prone and more reliable and comfortable on the client side.

Not sure what you mean exactly by "release and deployment process" (in the maven lingua, this is about SCM tasks automation and deployment of artifacts to a remote repository). If this is about deployment to production machines, I personally don't think this is really a job for Maven (and we don't use Maven for this). Maybe have a look at dedicated solutions like ControlTier, SmartFrog, Puppet, Chef, etc.

What strategies do you in general use for delivering your products to your customer? Does someone have had any experiences with a similar situation (i.e. shared runtime environment for 3rd party and self developed applications)?

We deliver the things we can control. If a customer wants to include his own bits in a given application, we would make the required subparts available but the packaging would probably be his responsibility.

Related questions

• Automated Deployment solution for multiple Java web-apps