Automatic Construction of Deployment Descriptors for Web Applications

Web applications are a kind of component based distributed systems, and these components are deployed in various containers and engines. In web applications, runtime deployment descriptors are corresponding to vendor specific platforms. Due to the complexities of applications and environments, it is tedious and error-prone for deployers to create runtime deployment descriptors manually. In this paper, we propose a generalized approach to promote the automation degree in runtime deployment descriptors construction. We view deployment descriptor schemas as models and create transformation relations between schema elements by a comprehensive matching method. Transformation code, in form of XSLT, can be generated base on parameterized templates. We implement a prototype and evaluate the effects of this approach with some experiments finally.