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Ships
(Virtual Machines)
Pojo Application Server

Now that you know what Coherent Disintegration is, and have an idea of how to design a standalone application and identify the POJO CD Unit, and have looked at the sample design patterns and seen how to turn that into a Harbor CD Unit, you will naturally want to get your application out there.

The first stage is to make an Executable Harbor CD Unit, which is an executable Jar, which as you know is a java application with a MAIN function and a special manifest.
IDE's like Netbeans make them automatically when you select a Java application project.

Please don't get confused here, we are not touching the original POJO Application, that's done, we are packaging the CD Unit so that other people can run the application easily.

If you think this is the UI side of the application, you have not got the concept yet.

Once you have an Executable Harbor CD Unit, and assuming you have Harbor online, anyone in the world that clicks on that Jar, will experience the wonders of your magical application.

Because a customer may get violent if you ask her if she has an Executable Harbor CD Unit, we call them SHIPS. 
Your application is in the Harbor, the customers have the Ships (CD Units).

Harbor has one more trick up its sleeve to help you get your ships to customers easily.
Lets just say your application in the harbor is called MAGIC.
The Executable Harbor CD Unit will be called MAGIC_SHIP, and the resulting main Jar is called MAGIC_SHIP.jar

Now if under your Harbor/Webapps at the same level as the Repository, you create a folder structure like this....

/Ships/MAGIC_SHIP/* All the files including  MAGIC_SHIP.jar and its libs *

Then if you type...

http://localhost:8080/harbor/ships/MAGIC_SHIP.jar

into your browser, your application will jump out of the browser and impress your customers.

So as a developer you dump full POJO applications into your Harbor, and your customers can either have the SHIP jar, or simply click on a URL in a browser.

Make a special note of the naming convention for this... it follows the name of the main jar file.

 

Another important concept is that the Ship is also your virtual machine.
Its the place (one will see this when they install harbor) where one can layout all the components in their application, from documents, icons, help files, file associations, signatures etc.
Why this is important, is because it allows you as a developer to have your own "space".
One doesn't know how and where their application is going to be installed on a remote machine, and having a "space" or virtual machine makes that easy, for example when an application has its own documents.

It all gets delivered and works within your virtual machine, even though on the remote machine, the actual physical location, and operating system is different.