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. If you are ready to distribute the application to the end users, it must then be deployed to the SAP Mobile PLatform runtime environment, after it has been published. At this point it will then be made available to and downloaded by those Agentry Clients that synchronize.
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.
When developing a new application or when customizing an existing one, it will be necessary to perform several publishes to an instance of the Agentry Server as provided with the SAP Mobile SDK. This Agentry Server instance should be installed as a development server. This occurs outside of the SAP Mobile Platform run time environment and is purely for development testing.
When development and testing are complete, the application can be deployed to the SAP Mobile Platform runtime environment. This process begins by publishing the application once more to the Agentry Server, again installed from the SAP Mobile SDK, but this time an instance of the Agentry Server installed for production. Once the publish is complete, the resulting files and resources are packaged in a ZIP archive and deployed to the SAP Mobile Platform runtime environment.
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.