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Mandatory "Java Sux!" - me

When I first read the story, up until I went to the company's web site, I thought the company selling the rides was Zero G Software. They make InstallAnywhere, a product I've used extensively. I thought it was a cool tie-in and a great way to get the company noticed.

Oh well, so much for the free ride for using their product to bundle our product...

Can anyone offer some input on how a programmer can redistrubute updated code to the users.

I'm sure there is a need for a mature, full featured, easy to use, cross platform installer that's open source. Unfortunately I don't know of one nor am I capable of creating one right now - although it's a good idea. Most of what you found in your search are installers for MySQL, Apache, PHP, etc. What I do know is that InstallAnywhere installers always seem to work on whatever platform I'm using (Win, Lin, Mac). They have an unlimited evaluation period and I'm sure you could get some nice extras by paying some money. I also suggest looking at AutoIt which is free (soon to be open source). It can be real nice when working around quirks in Windows.

On the commercial side, the most common multiplatform installation tool is InstallAnywhere by Zero G Software. Great tool and certainly has its place along with native binary packages - I've seen tons of enterprise applications that install with InstallAnywhere.

Java just isn't popular on the desktop, because you never know what crazy JVM version someone's going to have on their system.

Wrong. Java applications can be distributed with their own private JVMs. Check out InstallAnywhere for more details.

Q

Take a look at InstallAnywhere at ZeroG. This is a java based install engine that runs on any platform that supports java. I've used version 4.x professionally and like it, though it does have a few problems (doesn't everything?). Version 5.0 was just released but I haven't taken a look at it yet. Hopefully, they listened to the suggestions I sent to them and incorporated them into this version.

The installer had both a graphic and console interface. My major complaint was regarding the console interface. You basically had to write all you steps twice, once for the GUI and once for the console. This was unnecessary work and error prone.

On my current project, a multitude of different plaforms must be supported. Besides half a dozen different Unixes, I must also deal with Windows NT/2k and Mac OS 9.

<rant>
All you Unix only people who say you write portable code don't know shit! Writing code that is portable across a few flavours of Unix/Linux is childs play. Let's see you write something that works on Linux, Mac, and Windows NT!
</rant>

Sorry, I had to get that out of my system.

After researching every conceivable system for cross platform installations, I've settled on Install Anywhere from ZeroG. Their JVM based installer covers all the platforms I deal with (and then some) and is extensible enough to be able to the specialized configuration necessary on each platform. I would have preferred to not need to write specialty code in Java (Perl being my choice), but I'll live with that. InstallShield Corp also has a JVM based installer, but it didn't seem to be as solid a product as the package from ZeroG. I hope I made the right choice.

NeXTStep (now MacOS X) has "obese" binaries that can support lots of different architectures. However, I don't know if the packages that NeXTStep uses support the execution of non-trivial code at install time. Also, I don't know if obese binaries were parseable by Mach-O based implementations and those where OpenStep was just a library (like the Win32 version).

Probably the most portable "execution" formats that can be understood across platforms are HTML, Javascript, and Java. You could distribute an installer that was just a web page, used Javascript to sniff the platform, then executed the installer for the right platform. (This would be considered a privileged operation and the user might be asked to confirm it, and the applet or script snippet that was implementing this would have to have its code signed.) Check out InstallAnywhere, which uses some of these techniques (at least the last time I checked, anyway).

If you are looking to do your project in Java, a great packaging tool that you should look at is InstallAnywhere by ZeroG. It provides the same functionality as InstallShield, but is java based. It also allows you to bundle the JVM of your choice with your product, to allow for seamless installation and execution. IA is used as the installer for JBuilder (although no JVM is bundled), and I'm using it for an upcoming product at my work (Adaptec) (no, it's not a Linux version of EasyCD either =-). It supports Windows, MacOS, and Solaris out of the box, and will support virtually any java enabled Unix with trivial changes that ZeroG tech support is happy to provide.
I know I sound like a sales rep for ZeroG here, but it has really made my life a lot easier considerig the nature of the project I'm on.


"I shoulda never sent a penguin out to do a daemon's work."

I'm the installer wrangler for my company, and I'm fairly impressed with InstallAnywhere, by ZeroG Software. It provides many of the features you describe. I use it to install on both Windows and Solaris; it's been fairly hitch-free, and their tech support (for the questions i did have) was responsive.

mahlen

Envy is the beginning of all true greatness.
--The Master, "Doctor Who: Logopolis"