OS X Server; standalones as OS X services

[Bill Vlahos]

XServe is pronounced "ex-serve" and it should make an outstanding Rev 
server application platform. OS X Server OS even on regular Mac hardware 
would also be outstanding. There are some considerations that we as 
developers would want to make regarding running server apps. under OS X 
Server. Any Revolution server app should work just fine without these 
considerations but even better following them.

Considerations
1. There is a built-in application called WatchDog which can be 
configured to autorestart an application if it should crash thereby 
assuring that your program would always be running. This would be 
similar to running as a service under Windows for all practical purposes.
2. GUI based applications require a display card which is an option for 
XServe so it may not be included in all XServe installations.
3. If a server app has a GUI the server needs to come up fully to the 
desktop which means that the server must log in automatically and then 
call the screen saver to provide the security lock. Revolution can 
certainly build non-GUI apps and they would not have this requirement.
4. Apple's server software in built in two parts. 1. A faceless non-GUI 
server app. and 2. Administrative front end which communicates over 
interfaces such as SSH, telnet, terminal, etc. and can be run on the 
server itself as well as a remote computer. This is probably a good 
model to follow and Revolution makes this pretty easy as it is 
cross-platform by nature.
5. You can get XServes with multiple CPUs (up to 2 at the moment but I 
would expect more in the future). I have not heard much in the way of 
discussion on Revolution's ability to use multiple CPUs on any platform 
but certainly the OS is fully able to work with multiple CPUs. I suspect 
that Revolution's unix roots will make life pretty good for OS X.
6. There are a bunch of features in the current and very soon to be 
released next major update to OS X, code named Jaguar, which 
specifically take advantage of some pretty nifty things on the XServe 
relating to high availability, redundancy, and performance which I 
expect to hear about next week at Macworld.

Now if I only had an application in mind for all this power...

Bill Vlahos

On Thursday, July 11, 2002, at 01:30  PM, Dar Scott wrote:

> The introduction of the XServe 1U rack server makes OS X Server a 
> little bit more interesting to me.  See...
>
> http://www.apple.com/xserve/
>
> OS X is listed as a compatible platform at the RunRev site, but it is 
> not clear to me whether this includes OS X Server.  Does it?
>
> I have used Revolution applications as utilities on Windows 2000 Server 
> and I have experimented with running them as services on Windows 2000 
> Pro.  I hope to run them as noncritical services on Windows 2000 
> Servers soon.  I don't know what the equivalent of services are in OS 
> X--I have some homework to do.  Has anybody been successful in running 
> a Revolution standalone as a start-at-boot server of some sort on 
> either OS X?
>
> At this point I'm not even sure how to say "XServe."
>
> Dar Scott
>
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