On Tuesday 2002-01-29 at 19:46:34 +0200, Jill Thomson wrote:

> Incidentally, I was interested by the original contributor's
> description of the system whereby the application was also run over
> the network. Is this the usual approach? So far, on admittedly small
> networks, I have installed the application on the client machine(s)
> in the belief that so doing reduces network traffic. I acknowledge
> that it will complicate maintenance.

My take on it is that the added administration of copying updated
executables is not worth the few milliseconds saved in program load
time, or the slight increase in LAN traffic (unless your users start
their apps several times a second, perhaps... ;-)). One disadvantage
of centrally storing executables is that some servers (Netware, for
example) don't allow you to update a file while someone has it open.
In the case of Netware, this seems to be for the entire duration
between launching the application and closing it. If you use a
sensible server O/S, like Linux, that problem shouldn't exist.


David Trudgett