FWD » Core Development » Runtime Infrastructure

The web client startup process is quite complicated, since we must have a FWD client for every web client. Some failures such as the "Cannot start embedded server." are reported to the user, though we don't report much detail about the real cause of this. Errors that occur after the spawner has been launched are not reported at all. This includes a range of problems with the spawner actually doing the spawning of the FWD client, problems with the FWD client JVM being started, FWD client startup/configuration issues, problems with th FWD client authenticating (there are 2 logins that occur!) and so forth. None of these show anything meaningful to the user if there is an issue. That is not suitable for a production quality system. Sometimes some information is present in the client or server logs. Any and all failure need to be reported all the way back to the user, with enough detail and specificity to allow the user or admin to correct the issue.

The Swing/ncurses clients are less complicated, but they also may have some of the same issues on startup. And we similarly do not report anything useful to the user. We need to resolve these cases as well. Let's try for common code here if possible.