I have a delphi app that logs data from various places and writes the data to a file. The app has quite an extensive GUI to allow display of the data, configuration of the options, etc.
One user has requested that the app be changed to that it can be run as a service. His reasoning is that the app could then be started at boot time and run without any user being logged in and would be available regardless of who was logged in.
My question is this: Is there any other solution that would enable me to install the app as it now exists so that it would still run with no user logged in and still be available to all users?
My gut feeling is that converting the app to run as a service is not trivial. I assume you would need 2 apps - the "headless" service application, and a GUI that was run by users on demand that could interact with the service (comments welcome here also).
There are commercial (and free) solutions like Firedaemon, which will run (almost) any application as a service.
On a sidenote, it shouldn't really be hard to separate logic and user interface - you should've done that already when you developed the application. Just because Delphi makes it easy to write business logic in the code behind associated with the user interface, that doesn't mean you should really do it. Have a look at the presentation pattern's at Martin Fowler's site.