Does anyone use Capistrano
for Java based application deployments?
Are there any benefits using Capistrano
over already existing tools like Maven
, ant
, or Eclipse Deploy, etc?
Any specific use cases for Capistrano
for java based apps?

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2 Answers
Its not correct to compare Capistrano with Ant and Maven. These applications are of a little bit different purpose. Capistrano can be combined with both of them. Capistrano is mainly deployment tool, while Ant and Maven are mainly for building and managing dependencies. It has very good facility of deployment something to the cluster and that's not connected to java or ruby. It provides a simpler DSL for such purposes, comparing to batch scripts its platform independent. it provides easy way of organizing deployment scripts by namespaces and tasks like ant. Consider the following script:
task :hosts => "host1, host2" do
upload <file>
run <comand>
end
It uploads a file to the number of hosts and runs command on all of them.
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ant is not a dependency management tool. No? I agree Maven is dependency and build management tool – Kevin Rave Mar 12 '13 at 18:25
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1Ant is not a dependency management tool, it is a make-like tool to build software; however, for dependency management it can be extended with __apache ivy__; however, the "dependencies" that are managed are software dependencies. Maven has an ivy-like dependency tool built-in, except that it can be leveraged in tasks, like deployment which is actually a different thing than simple dependency management. – Edwin Buck Mar 12 '13 at 19:33
Rails is a framework coupled with the Ruby language, and Capistrano is roughly described by Wikipedia as a "script runner".
Capistrano provides absolutely no examples of Java deployments within its general user documentation, it probably could be bent to deploy Java, but it is obvious that this is not functionality that is offered "out of the box".
Both of these choices are going to unnecessarily complicate deployment to a Java web container. Unless you have a wealth of knowledge about the inner workings of Capistrano, and the time to bend them to properly deploy Java web applications, I would look towards solutions that provide Java deployment out of the box.

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