Distributed Ant: a system to support application deployment in the grid

e-Science has much to benefit from the emerging field of grid computing. However, construction of e-science grids is a complex and inefficient undertaking. In particular, deployment of user applications can present a major challenge due to the scale and heterogeneity of the grid. In spite of this, deployment is not supported by current grid computing middleware or configuration management systems, which focus on a super-user approach to application management. Hence, individual users with limited resource control deploy applications manually, which is not a grid scalable solution. This paper presents our motivation, design and implementation of a grid scalable, user-oriented, secure application deployment system, Distributed Ant (DistAnt). DistAnt extends the Ant build file environment to provide a flexible procedural deployment description and implements a set of deployment services.