Running Cocoa applications from file servers
Running Cocoa applications from file servers
- Subject: Running Cocoa applications from file servers
- From: Erik Buck <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 07:43:37 -0800 (PST)
There is a interesting but long rant about software installers at
http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/02/on_installers.html. Most of the rant is about problems with "pushing" applications to remote client computers.
I'll try to keep this Cocoa related: All of the applications I develop are Cocoa applications, so for me at least, the answers will only be relevant to Cocoa.
We have had the discussion about drag and drop vs. installers before, so let's avoid that. My question is about why we install anything locally at all? For years, I used a lab full of NeXTstep and Openstep machines that all NFS mounted a Sun file server. The applications were placed (I don't want to say installed) on the Sun server.
>From any particular computer in the lab, I would just double click on someapplication.app in the /LabApps folder, and the application would start up an run. It didn't matter if I sat at an Intel, 68K, or SPARC system due to the magic of fat binaries. The application was never on the local hard disk at all.
If we wanted to "deploy" a new application, we just copied it to the Sun server and anyone who wanted it could double click. When we upgraded an application, we just copied the new version to the Sun server. There was no "pushing" of applications.
Where did the fetish for installing every single application on the local hard disk come from ? Isn't it insane to have 35 installed copies of OmniGraffle using up disk space just because you have 35 licenses ? Why is MS Word on every disk instead of just the server?
So, to keep this Cocoa specific, have there been any framework changes that impede running Cocoa applications from a read-only server mount ? Are preferences a problem? Are fonts an issue ? Is access to ~/Library/Application Support an issue ? I can't think of any reason running from a remote read only mount would be a problem, but I'm not in a position to try right now.
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