Applications and versions
An application includes a program (actually, usually several programs: different versions and different platforms) and a set of jobs. A project can operate many applications. Applications have the following required properties:
- Name: A short name (used to name directories, so don't use special characters like /).
- User friendly name: the name shown to volunteers.
Optional properties:
- Homogeneous redundancy: this application uses homogeneous redundancy.
- Weight: the proportion of workunits of this application to be sent when the feeder is run with the -allapps option.
- Beta: whether jobs should be sent only to beta-test users.
- Minimum version: issue work to clients using the anonymous platform only if their reported application version number is this or greater.
Applications can be created using the xadd utility, based on a description in the project.xml file. Applications can be created or edited using the Manage Applications page of the administrative web interface.
An application program may go through a sequence of versions. A particular version, compiled for a particular platform, is called an application version. An application version can consist of multiple files: for example, a controller script, pre- and post-processing programs, and a primary program.
An application version has the following required properties:
- Version number: an integer. Version numbers should be used consistently across platforms; Windows version 304 should be computationally identical to Mac version 304.
and the following optional properties:
- Min and max core client version: don't send jobs to clients outside this range. Specified as an integer, encoded as Major+Minor*100.
Application versions are created using update_versions. Descriptions of application versions are stored in the app_version table in the BOINC DB. Application versions can be edited using the Manage Application Versions page of the administrative web interface.
