T-Systems-MMS

Freelance position1 as Build- and Deploymentmanager within a J2EE Enviroment.

T-Systems Multimedia Solutions GmbH (MMS); Jena/Thuringia, Germany; 2010.

The “Jena branch” of MMS creates web based, customer tailored shop systems for large and midsized customers as well for internal use. All shop systems tailored in Jena are based on IBM’s Websphere Commerce suite, an extendable J2EE framework for B2B and B2C business models.

I joined the build and deployment team as Buildmanager. Amongst our responsibilities were the provision of complete shop instances, build environments, build servers and accompanying build and deploy infrastructure. Furthermore, we were responsible for daily builds and deployments as well as for update and maintenance of database records.

A particular corner stone of my employment was to supervise and improve our processes besides participating in our daily routine work. A particular highlight was the ability to create a shop instance without user interaction. Before I joined, shop instances were created in an interactive way using GUI based installers. One problem with this approach is surely the time it takes to complete such a complex installation (setting up the database, the application server, the commerce instance, the update installers plus fix- and feature packs, to run all in a cluster et cetera). More important for us was the ability to be able to recreate such a setup. Before, we ended up in systems with a big variety of installation details like location, user names and passwords, instance names, permissions and cluster settings to name a few. By scripting the complete setup, we got hold to provide a system in batch mode and in a reproducible way thus essentially allowing anyone to carry it out.

Technologies

Buildtools (Ant) Buildserver/CI (Hudson, Anthill), Artifact Repositories (Artefactory, Nexus), SCM (Subversion, git), Project management (trac), Windows (XP, 7), Virtualization (VMWare), IBM Websphere (v6, v7), IBM Websphere Commerce (v6, v7), IBM DB2 (v8, v9), IDE(RAD), IBM Scripting Console (wsadmin), Other (J2EE, Emacs, vi, Cygwin, Jython, jacl,Tanuki Wrapper, XSLT/XPATH).