Many organizations have multiple stages that must be passed before deploying an integration application to production. Typical stages include development (Dev), quality assurance (QA), and production (Prod). Promoting an application from Dev to QA and QA to Prod can be an involved procedure particularly if the application requires a specific configuration for each environment. For example, the Dev environment may use development only data stores and the QA environment may use a different set specific for QA. The connections to these data stores would require configuration at each stage.

In order to reduce the amount of "hands on" configuration that must be done to promote an application, the capabilities of the iWay Integration Application (iIA) feature can be leverage. An iIA is application archive built using iWay Integration Tools (iIT) and deployed with a configuration template that contains the configurations for the target environment. The application archive can contain channels, libraries, resources, and web services needed for a complete integration application. The template can contain providers, registers, and settings specific to a particular environment.

Continuing the example above, a template can be configured that contains data providers used to connect to the development environments data stores. When the application is deployed to the development server the application runs in a configuration created containing the settings from the template. Likewise if a QA template is created containing data providers configured for the QA environment and the application archive is deployed to the QA server, the application then runs in a configuration containing the QA settings.

iIAs are also scriptable through ANT thus reducing the need to access the iSM console to deploy the application. Some of the capabilities that can be scripted include building, publishing, deployment, redeployment, starting, stopping, and deleting. Scripts can be built to allow others to deploy and start applications in secure environments to which developers may not have access.