CORBA26 — Component assembly templates

In a complex distributed environment, the implementation of highly
available and highly reliable services requires redundant placement of
software components in all their manifestations. Assemblies provide a
nice, convenient way of specifying the deployment and activation of
components and the connections that relate them for a particular
purpose. Now, for various reasons and Fault Tolerant CORBA
notwithstanding, in corporate reality this sequence and specification
will occur in multiple places in basically identical fashion. About the
only thing that changes are the host names and their network addresses;
everything else from the hardware configuration to the size of the disk
drives and file systems is (and inherently must be) exactly the same
among all deployments. This, for example, is one technique to support
geographic site failover.

My question is, has anyone thought of a two or more stage XML process,
one in which the package or assembly composition and deployment XML is
specified as a template or configurable, parameterized entity, and
another where the parameters have been substituted for "finalization"?
This can occur at two distinct points in the life-cycle: one set of
substitutions occurring when an artifact is deployed (installed?) on the
various computer systems involved, and another when the home [and
possibly individual instances] of the artifacts are activated
(instantiated?) to run on those computer systems. My work in the
telecom and defense industries has show that deployment of anything is
rarely a singleton event; there are always redundancies, replications,
and backups to take into account. Templates seem to provide a nice
solution to all of the manual editing required.

rejected