Best practices for app initialization?

[eluser]Doug Lerner[/eluser]
[quote author="Aea" date="1215759007"]Initialization?

The only time I ever even needed up look at such a thing was when dealing with an extremely complex system. You should have your files in the right place without needing to run a check to see if they are.

Why do you need to do this?[/quote]

(1) Well, if I'm creating a complex app for a customer and the customer has access to the filesystem with FTP, maybe the customer might accidentally delete a file somewhere. So I would want to check for its existence.

(2) Or let's say I develop an app and several customers are using it at different sites, and I want to update some tables in the database to reflect some bug fix or enhancement. Rather than go into each table and manually make the adjustment for each site running the app, wouldn't it be nice for the app to update the tables automatically if they haven't yet been updated?

There are lots of reasons, for robustness, or for the sake up automating updates, where you might want to run an initialization script and make sure everything is ok and up-to-date.

doug