[Axiom-developer] Re: doyen and virtual appliance

[root]

My understanding of the "virtual appliance" concept would be something
like a regular application stripped down to the essential elements and
packaged as a virtual machine. So, for instance, you could take ProTools
or Cakewalk (music software), add a bunch of special purpose tools like
LilyPond (open source music notation software), remove anything not useful
like browsers/email/office/etc. Then you put the result in a virtual machine.

My view would be that it mimics the VCR... a standalone special purpose
device. Packaging it all in a virtual machine means that you don't have
to worry about corrupting your local machine or ending up in DLL hell.
Adding a virtual machine is a copy operation on the disk-image file.
Removing one is the same thing. It's quite useful.

I have a half dozen VMs that I regularly use for Axiom testing and
they are all quite incompatible.

So Doyen would be a virtual machine focused on adding and integrating
scientific software into a single purpose platform. A hyper-packaging
concept. Instead of installing a dozen tools to get a local axiom
wiki working you just copy the VM image. 

t