Questions regarding a move to "hot deploys"/"graceful deploys"/"graceful upgrades"

[coffeeisterrible]

Hi,

We're using resin 4.0.17 open source. Currently, we have two web apps we have set up with resin. In each definition in the resin configuration, we specify id, root-directory, archive-path, redeploy-check-interval, and dependency-check-interval. Our deploy process creates a new dated folder, dumps the specifically named war files there, and then symlinks root directory to the latest release and restarts resin. This means roughly 5 minutes of downtime.

We'd like to get into zero-downtime deploys. As I understand it, in order to do graceful deployments, we'll need to add 'versioning="True"' to each of the two web app definitions, and then change our deploy process to dump new war files into the same directory as the current deployment, but with version/date numbers appended to their names. But this raises the question of how to specify our custom 'archive-path' properties, which currently point to specific war files, when the war files are dynamically named (versioned).

Can anyone provide some insight on this matter?

Thanks,
coffeeisterrible