Deploying the Erudine Behaviour Engine in Staged Environments

Purpose

To understand how to deploy the Erudine Behaviour Engine into different environments.

Theory

The Erudine Behaviour Engine is typically deployed into several different environments during the lifetime of a project. These environments may include a development environment for creating knowledge models, a testing environment for testing new knowledge models and a production environment for the final deployment of knowledge models. Since individual project requirements often differ, you may only need a development and production environment. Alternatively, you may need more testing stages or live deployment to several different production locations.

The architecture of the Erudine Behaviour Engine makes the transition between different environments very straightforward. The behaviour of the system can be easily transferred between environments whilst allowing platform-specific configuration. An illustration of three example environments is shown below:



For each different environment, see Connecting to databases for details of how to connect to databases.

When using the Erudine Behaviour Engine the files that hold the behaviour are referred to as knowledge models and have a file extension of .KNM. Additionally, each knowledge model file has a corresponding preview file of the same name, with a .KNP file extension.

When knowledge models pass between environments, they remain unchanged. Within each different environment, the Erudine Behaviour Engine will have to connect to a number of enterprise resources such as databases. These resources are linked to knowledge models using logical names, which may link to different physical resources in each of the deployment environments. For example, the logical name could link to a MySQL database in a development environment, an Oracle test database in a test environment and the live Oracle database cluster in the live environment. See Connecting to databases for details.

For each environment, the mappings from logical names to physical resources are detailed in a configuration file specific to the platform.

Since the Erudine Behaviour Engine is written solely in Java code, it benefits from all the cross-platform advantages that this language offers; this means that it can be deployed on to any platform that supports a fully compliant supported Java runtime.

Platform: all
EBE Version: 2.4
Category: Administrator Guide
Author: Colin Froggatt