[Gllug] Mature (web)app deployment/management frameworks?

[Walter Stanish]

> You are not going to find a self-contained, well supported, mature,
> platform-independent web application framework that is also designed
> to integrate well with your OS of choice and favourite 
> monitoring/deployment/packaging systems.  Almost by definition, 
> such a system would be obvivious to those things.  So some of your
> requirements are irrelevant (except as context) and others are just
> not realistic.

Apologies, to be clear I was describing what I'm trying to build more so
than what I expect to find pre-built somewhere for free :)  Context was
thus included...

> * Deploys cleanly to a VM: if it deploys cleanly to anything, it'll
>    deploy cleanly to a VM.  

... like this for example, more contextual :) 

> Automatic dependency system that integrates well with your favourite
> OS's package manager - not going to happen.

Well, not 'out of the box', but it really can.  For example I was
thinking of using a script to auto-generate new 'favourite OS packages'
from the latest SVN commits to a given project.  Obviously it would
be necessary to specify manually the distribution-specific dependencies
or integration process once, however all subsequent SVN revisions could
easily have auto-generated, even auto-provisioned packages with no
manual effort.  And for multiple platforms, one could rinse+repeat
the intial time investment.

> I think you'd have much more success using something like Puppet 
> to control (or at least prompt) the typical web framework 
> dependency/application deployment system than you would trying to 
> do it at the OS packaging system level.

I don't know very much about puppet, but I assume it requires you to
actually rewrite a lot of the stuff distro-specific package managers
will include as macros in their package format's install/upgrade
scripts around dependency resolution ... when you have >100 system
level tools & libraries called in by the web application (I hate
that term, maybe 'web-based system' or 'system with a web interface'
is closer to the truth), I don't think manually duplicating system-
level package manager capabilities is going to be as efficient
or resilient as simply integrating it, at least in the longer term. 

> In fact, I think the lower level packaging system is the wrong tool.
> You can use it to install the basic package for the web framework
> itself, sure (but even there, it'll probably crap all over your
> packaging system once it's installed and wants to upgrade stuff).

<im-just-saying-no-distro-war-please>
The 'crap all over your packaging system' phenomenon is one of the
bad memories I have from other Linux and Unix distributions, before
switching to gentoo, where I'm yet to encounter (after at least 4-5
years) any serious packaging related issues.  I'm not saying that
lightly, I'm dead serious - it's one of the most compelling reasons
I tend to avoid deploying on other distros / Unices today.  (If you
Get past the very-informative but not-quite-as-trivial-as-other-
distros installation hurdle!) 
</im-just-saying-no-distro-war-please>

> Having probably not been as helpful as you wanted, I'll do some
> thinking for another e-mail with some actual suggestions.

Cool

- Walter
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