Build and deployment day

Today was deployment day for a project I will be more than happy to see end soon. Nothing in our deployment process is automated so we have to come in to the office on a weekend, or kick everyone out of the application one day during the week. Then it’s time to take stock of database tables that have changed so we can script them to the production database. Next we have to import data from any new lookup tables in development to production. After that, it’s time to determine which ColdFusion files and CFCs have been added or updated and then moved into production. After all that is done, it’s time to test everything to make sure it all still works. Once again, this is a manual process so we have to test every process in production to make sure the new stuff works and old stuff still works.

Great day at CFUnited ‘08

Great information to be had today at CFUnited ‘08 Day #2. Two sessions that stood out for me were Peter Bell’s Practical Code Generation and Marc Esher’s Automating the Build/Deploy Process with ANT.