Deployment Using the Force Platform Migration Tool

If you have been reading this book from the beginning, you have already used another deployment tool. The scripts you have used to update or refresh your development organization used the Force Platform Migration Tool.

The Force Platform Migration Tool is a library that is used in conjunction with Apache ANT. Apache ANT is a project that is used to run a series of scripts that define your deployment process. ANT is extensible, which means you can blend additional functionality into the basic scripting environment.

The Force Platform Migration Tool provides a higher level interface from ANT to the Metadata API, the same API used by the Force Platform IDE. You can use the scripts for this tool to both deploy components, as well as remove components in the target organization. Because the Migration Tool is used with ANT, you can include other scripts as part of your deployment.

The scripting capabilities of the Migration Tool mean that this option is well-suited to repeatedly perform the same tasks that you would perform with the Deploy to Server choice from within the IDE. This repeatability makes the use of this approach very appropriate when you are migrating Force Platform components to more than one internal target, since you will still have to have access to an appropriate user in the receiving organization.

You can find out more about the use of the Force Platform Migration Tool in additional documentation available through the Code Share project for this book.