Deploying

Software deployment is a very broad term, and can extensively be used to refer to the whole software life cycle, from development to release into production. However, in this particular context, I am referring to the deployment phase as the one in which the software is compiled and opportunely packaged, and the right configurations are applied. The software is then supposedly run and made ready for users to access (which is part of the process of releasing; more on this in a couple of sections). While we already mentioned some of these topics in this book, I would like to highlight a couple of them, useful for the purpose of this chapter.

Building the code

The phase of building the code, intended as compilation and packaging into a deployable artifact (.jar, .war, and .ear in the case of Java), is done by utilities shipped with the JDK (in particular, the javac tool).

However, this process often includes at the very least the management of dependencies, but in the...