SmartFrog – configuration management system

Smart Framework for Object Groups (or SmartFrog) is a powerful and flexible Java-based software framework for configuring, deploying and managing distributed software systems.

With SmartFrog, system configuration details such as: which components make up the system, on which computers those components should run, how the individual components are configured, in what order they are started, and how they are combined into a complete system, are captured in “system descriptions”.

SmartFrog consists of the SmartFrog Language, the runtime, which interprets the language, and the Component Descriptions that the runtime configures and deploys according to the templates provided in the language.

The configuration of components is described using a domain-specific language, whose syntax resembles that of Java. It is a prototype-based object-oriented language, and may therefore be compared to Self, an object-oriented programming language.

Features include:

• Systems can be installed, started, stopped and uninstalled completely automatically.
• Increased flexibility: you can radically change the deployment architecture by altering the configuration files. This lets you experiment with different configurations for enhanced performance or reliability.
• Rapidly bring up new hosts, real or virtual, and install applications in them. This makes it easier and cheaper to scale out an application.
• Reduced configuration errors. The language eliminates duplicate information, sharing it between components instead of relying on cut-and-paste duplication. Furthermore, if the SmartFrog configuration files are kept under revision control, it is easy to roll back to previous configurations.
• Enables a rapid, integrated build-deploy-test cycle. As you can now deploy from your build, running tests against deployed systems, developers can integrate deployment and functional testing of their deployed systems into their build cycle. And not just the developers – the Continuous Integration server can deploy and test systems too, particularly when the complexity of the overall system starts to grow.

Website: www.configuredthings.com/smartfrog
Support: SourceForge
Developer: HP Labs
License: GNU Lesser General Public License

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