Chapter II-5. Delivery

The project's final phase was the deployment and delivery of the application. Having previously received MonkeyTongue's acceptance, Vshift was now ready to move the application to MonkeyTongue's production server. Although it seems as if everything is completed, the team must stay focused to successfully transition the application to a live environment. Because Vshift wants to ensure a seamless transition, it has created a deployment checklist (Figure II-5.1). By following the checklist and testing each item, the team will know for certain what has been completed and what is left to be done.

Figure II-5.1. By following a deployment checklist the team will know when all of the deployment tasks have been completed.

The Vshift team members logged in to the MonkeyTongue servers remotely and began the installation process. Following the checklist, they installed ColdFusion MX on the Web server and installed the database on a separate database server.

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Whenever possible, databases should be installed on a separate server, away from the Web server. This ensures that the two key parts of the Web application have separate processors so that they can work equally hard to handle the Web traffic.

Also, a data source was created on the Web server to allow it to communicate with the database. Next, the Vshift team migrated the actual application code (consisting of the ColdFusion CFC and the Flash files) to the production server. The only code change necessary was to switch the Flash Gateway server in the Flash code to point to the MonkeyTongue production Web server:

 NetServices.setDefaultGatewayUrl("http://www.monkeytongue. com:8500/flashservices/gateway"); 

With the deployment checklist completed, Vshift knows that the application has been migrated to production successfully. The application now resides on the MonkeyTongue servers, and the company's sales team members can begin to fill out expense reports while they are on the road.