Applications and versions

An application includes programs (typically with versions for different platforms) and a set of workunits and results?. 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 client using the anonymous platform? only if their reported application version number is this or greater.

Applications are created using the xadd utility. The above properties are specified in an XML element in the project.xml file.

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 require 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.