posted 17 years ago
Gian,
This is not a topic that I address in the book, but I'll give you my thoughts.
My goal with any release process is to minimize the pain involved. Painful releases just discourage people from doing them, which in turn makes the release more painful.
So, which is more painful, war files or a directory full of loose files. To my mind, the loose files are far more painful. Old files can be left around. I might run into permission or case problems on a Unix server. To avoid these, I would want to move the old directory out of the way first, which definitely requires a cleanup process after the release is done.
War files avoid several of these problems, so present less pain. I'd therefore advocate for war files.
Cheers,
-Mike