An Architecture for Post Development Con guration Management in a Wide Area Network

Few tools exist to address the post development ac tivities of con guring releasing installing updating recon guring and even de installing a software sys tem Certainly there is no uni ed approach for all of these activities and none that can take full advan tage of a wide area network The Software Dock repre sents an architecture for supporting post development activities in such a setting It is designed as a system of loosely coupled cooperating distributed components that are bound together by a wide area messaging and event system In this paper we describe the Software Dock architecture and discuss the use of a prototype in deploying a complex system