I hope this doesn't give anyone else similar ideas, but I need some
advice :-)
I am trying to help the developers of a Java API that uses a Derby
database to hold centralized information specific to a machine.
The API gets invoked when products are being installed or upgraded on
the machine and records product information, versions, dependencies,
etc, but otherwise they don't want it to run.
They have a requirement for multiple jvm access, primarily for nested
installs where one product installation accesses the database and needs
to launch a child process to install another product. Their
implementation starts network server on-demand if it is not started
already and then connects with the client driver. Additional processes
that come in will check and find network server running elsewhere so
will just connect to the already the started server. They think the
"parent" process will always come in first, so there is not a risk of
one process bringing network server down in the middle of someone else's
work.
This all seems very fragile to me and is a new and untested
configuration, but I am having trouble coming up with a good design
suggestion. They at one time tried a service but do not want the full
time overhead of a server running and don't want to require root access
to start the service.
Any other ideas?
Thanks
Kathey
