Re: [gaggle-discuss] Boss as Windows service / Mac | *nix daemon?

[Dan Tenenbaum]

Hi Lee,

You have a few options.

I  **believe** the following command line will work. I tested it and it does...but I didn't test it as a line in a startup file (like /etc/rc.local), and then reboot.

 nohup java -cp boss.jar:cytoAux.jar:data.jar org.systemsbiology.gaggle.boss.GuiBoss --startInvisibly > /dev/null 2>&1 

You may need to add & to the end. For testing you may want to redirect to a log file instead of /dev/null.

You can get the jars mentioned with these commands:

wget http://gaggle.systemsbiology.net/2007-04/boss.jar
wget http://gaggle.systemsbiology.net/2007-04/cytoAux.jar

wget http://gaggle.systemsbiology.net/2007-04/data.jar

Also, you can explicitly **not** autostart  the boss in your goose by calling setAutoStartBoss(false) on your RmiGaggleConnector.

You can print a message telling your users to start the boss first (and then optionally exiting). Or just have them reconnect when they have started the boss.

Another option would be to just make a new boss--a quick, UI-free implementation of the Boss interface.

Of course, the first suggestion, and the one just above, would give you a boss that you wouldn't be able to interact with; that is, you couldn't click any of its buttons. You may not care about that.  Another option would be, in conjunction with the UI-free implementation of the boss, would be to write some code that can communicate with the daemon boss.

Some similar ideas have been tossed around. One is a locally hosted web app that has an embedded boss, but you could modify that to just be a thin "client' that talks to the boss daemon using RMI or any other protocol.....

Hope this helps.

Dan

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 6:18 PM, Lee <wlee...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi All,

Preface: This is partly a curiosity of mine and partly a necessity
from the MatGoose development standpoint ...

How feasible would it be to implement the Boss as a background process
that starts automatically upon boot or user login and stops -
gracefully that is - on user logout/os shutdown?  Access to the boss'
functions or even the gui interface could be through a system tray
(Mac Menubar) icon.

I noticed a couple posts regarding uncertainty of whether a boss was
currently running.  An above implementation would possibly reduce this
confusion.  As the MatGoose developer, I have a small issue where I
get a bunch of 'not connected' errors at the Matlab terminal while
waiting for a boss to download and start.  Things work fine in the end
despite the errors, but to avoid this ugliness - e.g. during demos - I
always manually start a boss, again something that could be remedied
if the boss was just always there.

Lee

[Dan Tenenbaum]

BTW, another startup option for the boss is --startMinimized, so you could create a login item (to use Mac parlance; though the same concept is available for other OSs) that would start the boss but keep its UI out of your way unless you wanted it.