In order to test application projects or to deploy applications to users in a production environment, the application project must be published from the Agentry Editor to the Agentry Server. From the Server it will then be deployed to those Agentry Clients that synchronize with it.
There are two types of publishes that can be performed, Development and Production. When publishing an application from the Editor, there are various aspects that will affect the type of publish performed and which options to select during the process. Additionally, the first time an application project is published to a Server there is some initial configuration performed by the publish process that will affect the Server.
Other options exist for the publish process, including the creation of files used for localization of the application. When performing a production publish, the publish version of the application must be set. Also during a production publish the option exists to delay the deployment from the Server to Clients until a specified date and time.
For all publish operations the application data is copied to the Agentry Server, with transformation of the application data into the format for the Server. This format will vary depending on whether the target Server is configured for development or production. The location of the application data will be either Application\Development for a development publish, or Application\Production\Version for a production publish. To perform a publish it is necessary to have read-write access to the installation location of the Agentry Server and its sub-directories.
In addition to performing a publish, it may be necessary to perform additional operations to fully deploy the application. This is most commonly the case in a Production environment, where factors such as network security, change control, and Server clustering can restrict access to the Agentry Server(s) in use.
With the release of the Agentry Mobile Platform v.6.0, the files generated during a publish are compressed by default. This behavior can be altered using the preference settings in Eclipse for Agentry. There is no difference in the process of publishing the application based on whether or not the files are compressed. The Agentry Server automatically determines whether or not the files are compressed and will process them accordingly.