In the current there are
so many e-Commerce sites, many online stores which are operate 24*7, So in this
situation it difficult to perform maintenance or test changes to the system.
The Web Sphere Commerce staging server allows the Site Administrator to update
the data on the staging server and test the changes, and then propagate the
change to the production server. This is useful for testing updates to the
product catalog, but it is also important for testing new shopping process
commands. The staging server is useful for both technical and business users. The
staging environment lets you move Web site assets within and across different
environments
For
example: Suppose in an online store there is a small changed, any
product has been update or any discount updated. So verifying these changes in
a test environment ensures that the changes do not cause incorrect or
unexpected situations in the production environment. Once tested successfully,
the changes can be moved to the production server. In an enterprise deployment,
you can define staging projects to move content from the development
environment to the integration/test environment, from there to the staging
environment, and from there to the production environment.
The staging environment
consists of two components:
- The staging database server.
- The staging server.
The staging database server contains
the business data, such as marketing campaigns and product catalogs, and
database resources that you want to stage to the database servers in the
production environment. Business users can update business data in the staging
environment so that you can test and approve the changes before you incorporate
the changes into the run-time environment. The staging environment prevents
disruption of the run-time site and services by isolating the test and
production systems.
The staging server is a mirror of the
production business management server. You create staging projects and routes
on the staging server to deploy site updates from the test environment to the
production environment. You can also use the staging server to deploy updates
to geographically distributed environments across a wide area network (WAN).
Comparison in Staging
environment and Production Environment
|
Setup
|
Staging server
|
Production server
|
|
Hardware
|
same
|
same
|
|
Software version
|
same
|
same
|
|
Operating system version
|
same
|
same
|
|
Configuration
|
same
|
same
|
|
WebSphere Application Server
|
same
|
same
|
|
WebSphere Commerce Server
|
same
|
same
|
|
Database server
|
same
|
same
|
|
Database
|
same
|
same
|
These similarities allow a user to test
changes on the staging server as if it were the production server. These tests
reassure users that changes that run correctly on the staging server will run
correctly on the production server. This is the basic philosophy of the staging
serve. Once the testing completes, a user may want a function to automatically
propagate the changes to the production server.
