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Synchronizing Web Server Files With Files on Client Machines
Do you know why Java applets are so popular, besides the reason that applets can run on a wide variety of operating systems? It is the ability to download the latest code from the server and run them. Similarly, when you start deploying PowerBuilder applications on the net, you also need to deploy up-to-date files. However, you can keep PBDs on the web server. The browser will download the file from the web server automatically, because you are referring to the latest PBDs on the server through dynamically generated HTML pages with appropriate hyper links.
However, what if you want to update the client machines with the latest PowerBuilder runtime DLLs or PowerBuilder virtual machine? Now, you need a tool that can check all the files you specify with the files on the client workstation for dates, sizes and versions and update them as necessary.
ActiveX control SYNC.OCX does that work for you. You need to find out the class id for this control, similar to Window ActiveX control and insert the code in the HTML page for this control. You need to specify only two parameters, the data file --a file that was built using the SYNC.EXE and containing the file details you want keep in sync-- and whether you want to display the status while this control synchronizes the client machine with the files on the web server.
To create the data file that has the details of files to be synchronized, you need to run SYNC.EXE as explained in the 'Application Deployment' session.
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