Phil! Long time no see my friend! Figured I'd try to jump in and lend a hand...
So, when transitioning to NG, "officially" you have 2 deployment options:
1. Deploy via WAR but WITHOUT the active solution included. This deploys a base Servoy server. Then you can import the .servoy files the normal way.
2. Deploy via WAR always, WITH the active solution included.
I put "officially" in quotes because my experience with several clients is that option #1 doesn't work the same. Odd bugs that can't be reproduced in developer pop-up, and when you redeploy the WAR with the solution included, everything works. So, we've standardized to always doing WAR deployments. The other benefit there is the WAR includes all the NG components, plugins, etc, so you always get a full update, and not just the .servoy code changes. The downside is your customers will experience downtime during the update, since you have to undeploy the current war and deploy the new one.
Since this whole process is somewhat painful for people, and in many ways, more complex than they used to do, we have some tools we've used to automate this. We use TeamCity and have SVN/GIT hooks setup to look for changes, and it spins up a Docker image we made, which starts up a Servoy Developer instance, and it builds your WAR, runs any unit tests, and can deploy it for you. The deployment part could be just dropping it via FTP somewhere, or redeploying another docker image in the cloud.
We are working on migrating from TeamCity to Github Actions (See:
https://github.com/features/actions ). Once thats working, we plan to offer that as a paid service that can be customized for each customer. Then deployments are as simple as doing a commit with a certain tag.
If that interests you, let me know and you could be our initial beta tester