Introduction

Whatever the applications are that you develop with AspectJ, you will usually want to deploy your application to a target environment so it can be made available to your users. Java application deployment can range from being as complex as providing context-specific runtime wrappers and scripts to run your application, or as simple as providing a double-clickable .jar or executable. So, deployment can often be a real headache for developers.

To add to this mix, AspectJ adds some additional requirements to your application deployment. The recipes in this chapter describe in detail those additional requirements that an AspectJ application imposes on a traditional Java application and some of the tools support that you have at your disposal to help you in the deployment process.

AspectJ is definitely not limited to just regular Java applications. You can deploy AspectJ applications into many different target runtime environments including Java Servlets and Java Server Pages inside Tomcat and Axis Web Services. These more complicated deployment environments often offer several different ways of deploying the same application. Some of these options are better suited to AspectJ than others and so this chapter focuses on describing the easiest routes to application deployment to these target environments.

As you work through the recipes in this chapter, it's worth remembering that many of the manual steps could be automated using Apache Ant or even command-line scripts and batch files. However, the recipes here deliberately walk you through all of the manual steps required to deploy into the various target environments to keep you in touch with what is going on at all times.