Preface:
My Company, like most, has several run-time environments and several release versions which themselves are composed of different versions of various jars.
For example, let us consider release versions 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 of Software X, which may be deployed to a developer computer, testing, or production.
Software-x-1.1 is itself composed of jarA-0.9.1 and jarB-0.7.5, but software-x-1.3 is composed of jarA-1.7.31 and jarB-0.8.1.
Currently we use Spring's PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer to configure run-time variables (such as database credentials), however, properties also change with release versions.
We also use Maven 2 POM version 4 to specify which versions of our code need to be used. We place the version numbers of our jars as properties within profiles (dev,test,prod) inside of the parent pom and then reference those version numbers in all project poms.
As of right now, we have no way to specify which project versions pertain to a given release other than the most current one. Moreover, we deploy our run-time configurations to the SSDM pickup which then configures and creates the services defined by the built versions of our software.
--
Questions:
Is there any procedure/tool we can use to build our product by merely providing the run-time environment and version number? IE "build 1.1 dev"?
Is there anyway we can store the required jar versions for each release build? We are currently versioning all files, including the parent pom, but merely versioning the parent pom does not record which release version is pertinent to that parent pom.
What else can we do to further automate the process of builds?
For example, if we could manage run-time configurations within the parent pom that would be a step in the right direction, but that seems like a violation of scope.
Any tool outside of our framework is inconceivable at this point, but not in the far future.
Summary:
How can we automate our build process to the fullest extent without being error prone?
If I summarize your problem: you want to manage release of versions across multiple environments, and you release distribution is an aggregate of executable (jars) as well as environments properties. Different versions of these deploy-able distributions propagate to diff env at different stages with there own set of env properties and you are looking at a way to have a common roll out (or may be release process) to handle all of this.
It seems the first problem you have is that you run a build per release per environment when you are propagating a release. If I am not wrong, you should try looking at your app architecture first to see if there is a way you can create environment independent binaries, in some cases projects prefer keeping properties as a separate module which is deployed along with the jars, and a Property Manager of sorts which figures reads the files, so you may have a maven module called properties, which bundles one zip each for every env set of property files. Your deployer script can then be given a parameter while running on which zip file to extract to a location from where the properties can be read into the application. What you gain this way is that you "create one release distribution per release - which has contents to run on all environments".
Also, is it the case that you release version is "not" the version that you have in POM? if not aligning your release version to POMs should be done. i.e. POM should be 1.3-SNAPSHOT when you are working on development phase of that release, and be bumped off to 1.3 in a branch when you are releasing it.
There are no one size fits all solutions for such things but practices similar to this one do help to a good extent.
PS Do let me know if I got your problem right, or have ended up beating around the bushes ;-) DS.