MAST - Mighty Automated Deployment (MAD)

Mighty Automated Deployment (MAD) is a Java 1.4 applet/application for deploying, installing, upgrading, and uninstalling Java software products. As of this writing, we currently deploy at least four products successfully using MAD (including MAD itself) , and it serves to ease the deployment process as well as make our product distributions uniform. It also eases users' task of maintaining the latest upgraded version of their software.

MAD is implemented dually as both a signed Java applet (it must be signed so it can get permission from the user to make changes to the local filesystem for installing/uninstalling, etc.) and a Java application. It requires the Java 1.4 plugin to run as an applet, and a Java 1.4 virtual machine to run as an application.

MAD uses standard Internet protocols to communicate with deployment servers. It uses FTP to deploy new products and new versions of existing products. It uses HTTP to obtain product information and download new products. No special software, other than an FTP and HTTP server, need to be running on the server for it to serve products via MAD.

Current features of MAD include:

• Upload of software products built by Mighty Automated Build (MAB) to FTP servers
• Automatic build versioning on remote server
• Managed deployment of uploaded products to user machines, including
  • Installation via simple wizard GUI
  • Notification to users when they use MAD whether they have the latest release of software they have previously installed
  • Automatic update for users to the latest release of any software they have installed.
  • Uninstall of any previously-installed software.
  • Ability to install any released version of a software product.

There are three distinct roles for MAD users:

1. End-Users: Users who want to use MAD to download and install software on their machines. These users can find documentation on using MAD as an end-user at the ISR software update site.
2. Software Developers: Users who want to deploy their software to users via MAD. These users can find documentation here.
3. Site Administrators: Users who want to deploy MAD at their own site. These users can find documentation here.

For detailed instructions on how to use MAD, proceed to one of the above sections.