In the software life cycle we have mainly (1) the pre-development (requirements, specification and design), (2) the development (implementation, prototyping, testing) and (3) the post-development (deployment) activities. Software deployment encompasses all post-development activities that make an application operational. These activities, identified as deployment life cycle, include: i) software packaging, ii) loading and installation of software on client sites, iii) instance creation, iv) configuration and v) updating. The development of system-based components made it possible to better highlight this part of the global software lifecycle, as illustrated by numerous industrial and academic studies. However these are generally developed ad hoc, and consequently platform-dependent. Deployment systems, such as supported by middleware environments (CCM, .Net and EJB), specifically develop mechanisms and tools related to pre-specified deployment strategies. Our work, related to the topic of distributed component-based software applications, aims at specifying a generic deployment framework independent of the target environments. Driven by the meta-model approach, we first describe the abstractions used to characterize the deployed software. We then specify the deployment infrastructure and processes, highlighting the activities to be carried out and the support for their execution.Keywords
