Application Management

One of the obstacles preventing end users from taking full advantage of the network environment is the difficulty of accessing remote applications. The Common Desktop Environment provides conventions for:

• Installation of applications so that they can be run remotely

• User navigation of available applications

• Execution of remote applications

The user can browse the collection of available applications with a GUI tool called Application Manager. Applications can be dragged onto the desktop for easier access. Even remote applications are started by a simple double-click, hiding the network location of a running application. The user is not aware of any distinction between local and remote applications.

This network transparency is accomplished by installing applications on network hosts designated as application servers. The parts of the installation relevant to the desktop require placing certain files in conventional places in the application's installation hierarchy. The application server maintains a list of applications that it is serving. Each host on the network maintains a list of the application servers on the network that it queries when a user logs into the desktop. This process is referred to as application gathering. It results in a dynamically-generated file hierarchy of actions arranged in folders. (Actions represent operations that end users can invoke, including starting applications.)

The Common Desktop Environment Application Manager provides a specialized view of the file system for the end user. Applications are arranged into groups and groups can be nested (such as in a directory hierarchy). Your application's installation script associates the application to a group. This association can be overridden by the system administrator as part of application server configuration. The set and arrangement of the actions shown through the Application Manager is a system resource that is typically shared between multiple users. Users cannot modify this view.

The user can drag an icon from the Application Manager onto the desktop, File Manager, Front Panel, and so on. The associated action remains valid as long as the gathered application that it refers to remains valid. Because actions represent a form of abstraction and indirection, the actual location of the application can change over time. This change remains transparent to the end user (this is explained further in "Method Invocation"). The user double-clicks on an action icon to invoke it.