posted 14 years ago
Relying on load order means the coupling between the apps is much too tight. The client should be prepared to deal with a server being unavailable at startup, just like it should be prepared to deal with a server that's going down and then comes back up later (which would allow you to restart the server independently of the client). The solution to both would be for the client to check periodically for server availability (say, every X seconds, for some reasonable value of X), and try to reconnect to it in case the connection is broken.