Releasing patches and updates to web service users

Question

I have written one web services using Java. Its already live (up and running).

During development I have SVN (repository) + Jira for task maintenance + Maven for building the web services. Now I have some small update for my web services and I have created that task in Jira and committed the files in svn with respect to Jira-Id after all testing, etc.

Say my web services is used by 10 clients, we did not give our source code to them.

Is there any steps/procedure available to release patch/updates?
Is there any way to render/create the change log at the build time (maven)?
How do I manage the change log for all version or Patch updates during build time? (Automatically)

Answer 1

If you use maven already, then consider making a private maven repository accessible to your customers providing your binary artifacts, and have your installations have "pom.xml" file for assembling the final installation.

Use the "[...)" syntax to specify you want the newest version within the given range.

You can then use a simple "mvn clean package" at the client to get the newest version.

Answer 2

Ideally you should try to distribute binaries in the form of package - such .deb or .rpm. This is not limited to distributing the packages for desktops alone, the packages can contain configuration files, module binaries and documentation.

Also, packages provide great way to apply dependency checks.

Once, you distribute elements as packages - there are mechanisms to declare patched versions (or incremental versions).Refer to this for more information. http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/build.en.html

Now, as far as - making release patches are concerned, ideally you should have every check-in with messages. Using SVN, you can use svn log to view all this. You can use this between specific versions as well. Based on this,you should create release-notes for every patch you produce and tag it.

The point is using svn log (if your logs are good) can be an automated mechanism to produced change-logs automatically.