Writing The Process Manager

• In a previous project I worked on, we had a team write an overly-sophisticated process manager.
• I took some of its requirements and said "we need this, only we'll write it in 1 month with one person, instead of half a year with 3+ programmers". How come? because of lessons learned, and because we'll only do the really necessary parts.
• What a process manager basically does is:
  1. Load a list of processes in a defined order, with configurable parameters and configurable environment (working directory, environment variables).
  2. Monitor these processes (both on the OS Level, and on the application level).
  3. In case a process crashes - it performs a configurable recovery operation.
  4. It allows shutting the system down in a convenient manner.

Originally written by guy keren