| Developing Web applications / Genero Web Services | |
To run an application, information must be provided to the Genero Application Server (GAS). Much of this information is common across a set of applications. Therefore, rather than have you provide all the information each time you configure an application, Genero supports the concept of inheritance. You define abstract applications to hold the basic information that is common across your applications, and then you configure your application to inherit the settings of the abstract application. There is no limit to the levels of inheritance: an application can inherit from another application (abstract or not) that inherits from another application, and so on. To inherit a default configuration from another application, you specify it as the parent of the application.
In general, an abstract application is defined first. This abstract application is not executable, but is intended to provide the baseline default configuration for other applications to inherit. You can create as many abstract applications as you require, and abstract applications can inherit a default configuration from another abstract application.
When configuring an application that is to be an executable, you can provide the configuration details in either the GAS configuration file, or you can create a separate application-specific configuration file, known as an external application configuration file. If you add the application to the GAS configuration file, you must stop and restart the GAS for the application to be recognized. If you create an external application configuration file, you can add the file into a defined GROUP directory and the application is immediately available without having to do a GAS restart.