Patent ID: 7660879

Claim:
A method for deploying changes to a domain, said method comprising: receiving a deployment request by an administration server, wherein the deployment request requests at least one change on at least one of a plurality of servers in a system domain: maintaining an active application context executing on each of the plurality of servers, wherein the active application context is a view of a running system domain in terms of configuration; generating, by the administration server, a deployment package instance for each of the plurality of servers based on the deployment request, said deployment package instance containing the change, and sending, by the administration server, the deployment package instance to each of the plurality of servers prior to committing the change; generating an inactive copy of the active application context on each of the plurality of servers in response to receiving the deployment package instance; applying the change contained in the deployment package instance to the inactive copy of the active application context at each of said plurality of servers; examining the change applied to the inactive copy at each of the plurality of servers by detecting any errors caused by the change being applied to the inactive copy; transmitting an acknowledgement by each of the plurality of servers if the change is validated after being examined, wherein said each server waits to receive a reply from the administration server before continuing with the change; receiving an acknowledgement from each of the plurality of servers to the administration server, the acknowledgement indicating that the plurality of servers are prepared to accept the at least one change, and upon receiving the acknowledgement then sending a command by the administration server to commit the change to the plurality of servers; and wherein, after receiving the command to commit the change, the plurality of servers deploy the change to the active application context.