| the File System, | the User Interface | and the File Locations | |
TFM is compatible with Mac OS X®, Windows® 2000, XP, ME, NT, 98 or 95 or any platform with a Java Virtual Machine, JVM™. TFM is a 100% Java swing application that requires Java™ version 1.3 or higher. TreFre recommends a minimum of 256 MB of memory.
There are few platform differences in the installation of TFM. They are mainly differences in locations of files. These differences occur only due to the variance in the platform file structure. For instance, a Windows® file system labels drives with a capital letter followed by a colon whereas Mac OS® uses disk names.
The only other difference between the Mac OS® & Windows® platforms is the look of graphical elements and the location of the menu bar. All graphical elements work the same as those elements would work in any other application on your operating system. The menu bar assumes the default behavior of a Windows®, the menu bar is at the top of each window. Therefore, the Mac OS® version has menu bars that deviate from other native applications because of the menu bar in each window instead of always at the top of the screen. However, since there is no way to hide the menu bar at the top of the screen, Mac OS® has a minimal menu bar at the top of the screen and all TFM window specific menus appear in each window.
TFM has several files it uses that are put into place at install and launch time.
Preferences & Log - a file called TFM.prefs in
a directory called TreFre in a directory called Library in
the user's home directory. The user's home directory is
determined by the user.home property of the JVM™.
Assume a user name of uName. In Mac OS X®, the home
directory is: /Users/uName. On Windows®,
given user name uName, the "user.home" property value
defaults to
C:\Winnt\Profiles\uName on multi-user Windows
NT systemsC:\Windows\Profiles\uName on multi-user Windows 95
systemsC:\Windows on single-user Windows 95 systemsThus, if the user name is "cathy", "user.home" defaults to
C:\Winnt\Profiles\cathy on multi-user Windows
NT systemsC:\Windows\Profiles\cathy on multi-user Windows
95 systemsC:\Windows on single-user Windows 95 systems/Library/Java/Extensions/ and
puts the actual data in /Library/TreFre/DB/. You
can also use any SQL database that java JDBC drivers. See
Database/Library/TreFre/Backups/./Library/StartupItems/HSQLDB/
to start the database server at boot time.Some practices wish to control access to their computers by creating user accounts for various office personnel. There are no limitations with running TFM and individual user accounts except for the fact that TFM will create a separate TFM preferences file for each user. The file will be saved in the File Locations folder previously mentioned. It there are particular preference settings that must be common among all TFM users, currently each person must log into the computer, set the required preference, and than save the TFM preferences. A future release of TFM may provide a central/global set of TFM prefrences.
In every TFM installation, there exists at least one database server and one client. As mentioned above, the database server can be most any SQL database server. TFM is distributed with HSQLDB. When TFM is run, it tries to connect to the database as specified in the Database tab of the TFM Preferences. This connection is used throughout the entire session. The primary parameter in the Databases tab is a jdbc URL (Uniform Resource Locator). This URL can point to a local database accessed via the local file system or can point to a local or remote database server via a TCP/IP network connection.