Network Application Development (NAD)

In the Network Application Development (NAD) architecture, you maintain a master copy of an application on a central network location, which is usually the development node. Each View node copies the application to a user-defined location and runs it.

When you notify clients of application changes (using the Notify Clients command on the WindowMaker Special menu), a flag is set in the application directory, which is then read by the View nodes.

You can configure how you want application changes handled for the View nodes. These range from ignoring the changes to automatically shutting down and restarting the View node, which reloads the master application.

In the following figure, the two View nodes have the master application registered from the development node, but actually run it locally on their computers.

Note: If you configure your application to write historical data to the master application node's application directory, all NAD nodes attempt to write their historical data to the master application. To avoid this, on each NAD node, configure historical data to write to a local directory, not the master application node.

If you are distributing a large, complex application to numerous nodes, slow system response time may be apparent on the initial download. Updates, however, are optimized. Application transfer may be a problem for slow networks or over serial connections.

Also, be aware of other network constraints, such as the user of routers that filter out certain types of network traffic and addresses.