Deployment is the process of  installing, configuring, and starting a system or application on a platform. In line with the general philosophy of Jade, we propose an architecture-based approach to deployment, i.e., we use an architectural model of a system as a guide for the description, the construction, and the deployment of system configurations, as shown on the following figure.

The elements that make up this process are organized as follows.

• The deployment description contains all the information needed by the deployment engine to instantiate a Jade-enabled application, i.e., an application made up of components equipped with the wrappers that allow it to be administered by Jade. The deployment description, written in Fractal ADL,  consists of the structural description of the application in terms of interconnected components (look here for an example of such a description), enhanced by deployment-specific information, such as co-location requirements and starting order.
• The deployment engine is derived from a Fractal ADL factory. It operates as a workflow engine, in which a compiler creates tasks that are executed by backend components, specialized for the various deployment functions.
• The current repository, which contains the software components to be deployed, is based on the OSGi Bundle Repository. Thus OSGi provides a uniform packaging format for the Jade components.
• The deployment target is a set of nodes, equipped with support for component instantiation, installation, versioning, updating, and removal. Since components are packaged as OSGi bundles, these functions are provided by an OSGi layer.