Bret Waldow wrote:I am starting the design of an application primarily for Linux machines, although perhaps it might be used on Macs too. I am not targeting Windows at all.
I'm probably going to use the GWT in a browser as the main UI - Firefox or Google Chrome when it's generally available. I expect either can run Javascript locally, but there are some features that may require a server. One would be to access a shared system library to ask for computation - it appears this violates one of the design choices for browsers, and so would require a local server (servlet, REST, or SOA) to allow access.
The question is not 'which one'. The question is 'how do I know if the user has already installed a server, and how do I install my app to that if it's already there?'
If I were to choose Tomcat, how would I know if they already have Tomcat installed? If they have Apache, what do I do then?
How is this question resolved for applications that require a server to function on Linux (and Mac) machines?
Thanks for help and pointers.
Regards,
Bret
cheers
Bret Waldow wrote:
If they have Apache, what do I do then?
Bret Waldow wrote:
You install Tomcat (a/k/a Apache Tomcat"). Apache itself is the name used to refer to the non-Java general web server, although the Apache project as a whole has a lot of Java stuff not related to the original Apache Http Server at all.
Often the most important part of the news is what they didn't tell.
Cloudgen C.F. Wong wrote:If you are going to use the GWT, I think you should consider the "Google App Engine" http://code.google.com/appengine/
Tim Holloway wrote:
Bret Waldow wrote:You install Tomcat (a/k/a Apache Tomcat"). Apache itself is the name used to refer to the non-Java general web server, although the Apache project as a whole has a lot of Java stuff not related to the original Apache Http Server at all.
Tim Holloway wrote:There are bigger issues here, however. One of which is that installing server software, if it's going to be on desktop computers, has the potential to really annoy the security people.
Tim Holloway wrote:Another is that there's no such thing as "a" server. Servers come in lots of different flavors: DNS, HTTP, FTP, DHCP, database, etc., etc., etc.. Quite frequently more than one of these servers will be running in the same OS on the same box at the same time.
Often the most important part of the news is what they didn't tell.
Tim Holloway wrote:Have you checked out XulRunner?
Tim Holloway wrote:You can probably invoke a native code library, but chances are you'll need to create a signed application and maybe some glue libraries
Tim Holloway wrote:Unless you're absolutely dead set on GWT, you'd probably find it less work to use SWT (Eclipse's GUI) or even Swing for Linux desktop apps. You don't need to have Eclipse to run SWT - the Spoon ETL GUI design tool of the Pentaho Business Intelligence Suite is a stand-alone Java application using SWT. Then again, some of the more ambitious systems use Eclipse itself. Eclipse can be used for other purposes besides as an IDE for software development.
And, of course, there's a whole raft of quick-and-dirty GUI app design options that come with the core Linux distros - or as minor add-ons, from dialog-assistes shell scripts to Tcl/Tk on up to and including (but not limited to) Python and Perl. Not even touching the not-so-quick platform options like C/C++ or even Ada.
Tim Holloway wrote:Sorry to be so pedantic, BTW, but not everyone understands the nuances of servers.
Often the most important part of the news is what they didn't tell.
Often the most important part of the news is what they didn't tell.
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