Adobe AIR supports cross-platform properties like flash.filesystem.File.applicationDirectory, which gives the application internal directory. There also the storage directory and the cache directory.
For example, the application storage directory looks like this on...:
Windows: file:///C:/Users/FooUser/AppData/Roaming/FooApp
Android: file://sdcard/Android/com.foo.app
I've considered the directories crate, but it has a required parameter, the app name. How can I determine these directories, specially from a library (not the entry point code)?
Related
I'm trying to use a software library to run some computations. These computations can be customized using a few configuration files in its share directory. Unfortunately this library only provides hard coded paths to specific files in its (read-only) share directory which store these default configurations. Thus right now only a super-user or administrator could modify them. The library doesn't search for any user-local versions of these configuration files. I'd like to develop a wrapper tool which additionally takes a path to an alternate version of one of these configuration files in the users home directory and have that file somehow appear to "mask" the original file on the file system for the duration of process execution without actually modifying the original file in any way (since it can't). Is there a Linux tool I could use to do this sort of thing?
I'm developing a cross-platform desktop application for Mac, Linux and Windows. The application will create a plain-text log file to help with debugging, amongst other things. What are people's recommendations for a sensible place to store the log on each of the platforms?
Here is my guess so far, based on web searches:
Mac: ~/Library/Logs/MY-APP-NAME/system.log
Linux: ~/.MY-APP-NAME/logs/system.log
Windows: %APPDATA%\MY-APP-NAME\logs\system.log
For Linux, the XDG Base Directory Specification is followed by some applications. Log files are not specifically called out as such. You can put them either into a subdirectory of the data directory ($XDG_DATA_HOME or $HOME/.local/share), where they will not be deleted automatically, or you could use a subdirectory of the cache directory ($XDG_CACHE or $HOME/.cache). In the latter case, the files could be automatically expired after some time.
In my code (which has worker role) I need to specify a path to a directory (third party library requires it). Locally I've included folder into project and just give full path to it. However after deployment of course I need a new path. How do I confirm that whole folder has been deployed and how do I determine a new path to it?
Edit:
I added folder to the role node in visual studio and accessed it like this: Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), "my_folder");
Will this directory be used for reading and writing? If yes, you should use a LocalStorage resource. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cloud-services-configure-local-storage-resources/ shows how to use this.
If the directory is only for reading (ie. you have binaries or config files there), then you can use the %RoleRoot% environment variable to identify the path where your package was deployed to, then just append whatever folder you refernced in your project (ie. %RoleRoot%\Myfiles).
I'd take a slightly different approach. Place the 3rd party package into Windows Azure blob storage, then during role startup, you can download/extract it and place the files into the available Local storage (giving it whatever permissions the app needs). Then leverage that location from your application via the same local storage configuration entry.
This should help you reduce the size of your deployment package as well as give you the ability to update the 3rd party components without completely redeploying your solution. And by leveraging it on startup, you can guarantee that the files will be there in case the role instance gets torn down and rebuilt.
Let say i have a cross-platform runnable application
This application create then read/write some data and preference in external files
Bundle hierarchy is as follow:
ApplicationFolder/application.jar
ApplicationFolder/database.odb
ApplicationFolder/config.xml
Whether it's on a Mac, Windows or Linux, the application knows that everything is next to her (ie: /database.odb or /config.xml)
Now comes the Self Contained Application feature provided by JavaFx 2
The application is embedded in .exe on Windows, .app on Mac and don't know yet about Linux...
As a Mac user i've tested it on Mac and saw that database.odb and config.xml are now created at the user root path
I thus agree that i should think of a cross-platform mechanism to save/read my application preferences regarding the operating system
But i'm not quite sure of what to do and how to do it (can't find any googling help either..)
On windows, the .exe is installed in a folder, so i guess i can keep the same behavior
On Mac, the .app is a folder and i should keep everything inside (how to get the .app path ?!)
Isn't there a built-in mechanism in Java/JavaFx ?
Thanks a lot for any comment, advice, documentation or else that you could give me
Badisi
There are many ways to do this. I have listed some of them here in no particular order. The recommended approach depends on the type of data being stored.
Java provides a couple of mechanisms (e.g. the properties API and the preferences API) for maintaining application preferences.
If your application is sophisticated enough to benefit from an database, then you might want to use Java EE or Spring, both of which have their own configuration mechanisms.
For read-only configuration, you can bundle the relevant files inside your application jar.
To store customized application configuration files or client application wide databases in relative to the application jar, write the required files at runtime. See How do I get the directory that the currently executing jar file is in?.
For user specific configuration, use System.getProperty("user.home") to retrieve the user's home directory, then create a subdirectory for your preference storage (for example "{$user.dir}/.myapp") with hidden file attributes so that it doesn't show up on a standard file directory list.
If your app relies on internet connectivity, then you can store some of this information server side rather than the client and make use of it from the client using internet protocols. An advantage of this approach is that user configuration and data is automatically ported across client machines.
my shared hosting only allows me to create 2 virtual directories. and i want to host multiple webapps... say an asp.net mvc blog, a forum, a personal site etc...
isnt there any other way of doing this? cant i simply just ftp the blog folder to one of my virtual directories and then access it online??
For ASP.NET web applications, typically each would live in its own virtual directory which serves as the application starting point.
Technically you could "piggy-back" two applications on the same application starting point in one of two ways:
Put all the files for each application in the same directory (and appropriate sub directories)
If you don't have ANY files that overlap, you can get away with this. Of course, it's likely that you won't with such files as the default or index pages, etc. And this would be pretty messy anyway.
Put all the non-binary files for each app in an appropriate subdirectory and the binaries in the main virtual's \bin directory.
You'll be able to do this only if each application's binary files don't overlap by name AND there are no namespace ambiguity conflicts between assemblies (two different assemblies by file name, but with the same namespace). The latter is much less likely to happen if you are trying to piggy-back two different applications.
The big problem I see with the latter solution is that any parts of the application that make use of application root references will break. When some code tries to resolve a reference to some resource (like an image) based on an application root reference such as
~/images/logo.gif
the ~ will get resolved to the virtual directory, but will not include the additional (non-virtual and non-app starting point) subdirectory in which the application lives. So instead of this:
/vd1/app1/images/logo.gif
you'll end up with this:
/vd1/images/logo.gif
Obviously, that won't work.
So... you won't break either app if you can put them both in the same virtual directory, however, you'll have to check for file conflicts and such. Possible namespace conflicts will be unavoidable without separate application starting points.
Can't you just put each app in a separate subdirectory in either of the virtual directories. e.g. if you had http://server.com/vd1, you could partition it like http://server.com/vd1/app1, http://server.com/vd1/app2, etc.