My name is Sean Blanton and welcome to the beginning of my OpenMake Mavericks blog series. This blog series is designed to teach powerful, field-developed techniques to create an agile, repeatable development to release environment. The series is designed not only to help effectively use the Mojo and Meister products, but also to address software change and configuration management and build management in general. For the first of my series, I’ll be taking you through how to create workflows in Mojo and Meister to get the greatest impact for your development and release tasks.

Mojo and Meister workflows can be easily applied to actions such as Java archive deployment. A series of workflow activities that perform the essential deployment steps can be constructed where each activity executes one of a series of copy commands or perl or ant scripts to accomplish the goal.

By writing simple scripts that each perform a specific task and having a workflow activity execute it, a great savings in lines of code and reduction of complexity can be achieved. By reducing the lines of code and complexity, the resources required for testing can be reduced as well. Let the reporting and logging of Meister do the work for you instead of coding into your script calls to logging functions. Using the dependency management of Meister frees you from coding flow control logic into your script. Constructed in this way, the Meister workflow monitor will report back live the success or failure of each essential step and log it.

In my next few posts, I’ll jump into more detail on the following aspects of creating effective workflows:

* Introduction Mojo and Meister workflows
* Letting Mojo/Meister control the workflow path
* Passing information between activities
* Real life workflows for Java deployment
* Designing your workflow for a complex task

I look forward to bringing you proven best practices from the field . I plan to post about once a week.