We already have a good build server in Hudson but we want something that would let us startup and shutdown servers, push out new deployments of software (which is much more involved than just a single WAR or EAR going somewhere, there is copying, extracting, renaming, etc.), and various other tasks we would like to automate.
I’ve looked at SmartFrog (seems largely academic rather than commonly used), ControlTier (a dose of heavy complexity to go with your complexity), Capistrano (Ruby and Rails focused), and Func (no docs at all, their MediaWiki has been wiped). Is there nothing that is a good 80/20 solution for this kind of thing. Surely you could have a tool that would offer a lot of what ControlTier offers without all the overhead.
The alternative is Ant scripts to do everything (possibly available through our existing Hudson server) or even a Hudson plugin of some type but that feels kludgy to me and I’m just not liking it as a solution (plus we might be rebuilding something when we don’t need to).
Please, tell me about a good alternative.
You might want to try Cargo. You can use ant and maven for the deployment definition you want and then set Hudson to point at your ant’s build.xml or maven’s pom.xml.