Running applications

Typical application is started by .exe file. When you are in shell and type application's name (without extension), shell looks for .com first. So we add small app.com to your app.exe which will do all necessary stuff:

• select which rain server to run
• limit DOS server memory consumption to 3MB
• run server
• run app.exe
• pass all commandline parameters to app.exe
• disable dos4gw and rain banners
• return 99 or DOS4GW error code when app.exe was not run due to some error
• return exit code of app.exe otherwise

Such .com loader is in RAIN package in two flavours, rename one to have the same name as your .exe application and distribute them together. It is standard way to run RAIN applications and it will remain unchanged in future versions if possible.

More direct way to run applications, but still with quite big chance to stay 100% compatible with future versions, is to skip .com wrapper and run directly RAIN.EXE with application name (app.exe for example) and parameters on commandline. RAIN.EXE does some necessary stuff:

• select which rain server to run
• run it
• run app.exe
• pass all commandline parameters to app.exe
• return 99 or DOS4GW error code when app.exe was not run due to some error
• return exit code of app.exe otherwise

Note: It wasn't possible to let applications spawn RAIN servers (DOS4GW doesn't run under RTM) instead RAIN servers spawn applications (RTM runs under DOS4GW).