Andreas Raab wrote:

John,

...

I'm not entirely clear what the benefits of true "headlessness" are on the Windows platform. It seems to me that one can always make the Squeak window quite small (to use less Display memory), then minimize it so it is out of the way. That way, if there are any errors, one can re-size the window and debug the problem.

Not if you're going to install it on any jointly used machines. Think of a Swiki web server running as a service under NT.

...

Headless-ness seems to make a bit more sense on a Unix box. But there, again, one could open Squeak's display as a remote X window on some other machine, just as a debugging console.

Yeah, this would be cool. Install a Swiki demon, telnet on a special port and run your debugging session remote without even letting others know that something happens right now. WHOW!

Andreas

Basically right. One benefit of true headlessness under UNIX (or NT maybe) is the ability to run on a machine with no window, not having to export the window. In some cases exporting the window becomes a security risk or an extra headache you don't need (if you are trying to start your web server over a text only slow phone connection for example)

If you want to be able to use Squeak as a web content generator (and I do, eventually) or a web server etc. then running headless is in some computing environments a necessity. If anyone wants to know the gritty details of why just email me...