Interesting, what such platforms that are widely used
produce such single EXEs. From my experience people
expect installation procedure--or it would require
special explanation that it does not require one,
but still the instructions must describe where and how to
copy it etc.
Double-clicking is done by means of short-cuts placed
on Desktop or Start menu, which can be done by setup
automatically.
For junior people nowadays the most friendly is web-based
interface. And J has ability to produce web-based solution.
No one could be able to tell from the browser that it was
done in J on the server. Here's a single-click solution for you:
(note: one click less!)
http://olegykj.sourceforge.net/jhp/
Possibly a logical issue would be how to make it possible
to roll out such solutions as easy as making wd forms or
editing a wiki page.
Related to mobile devices discussion, iPhone and other smart phones
have great browsers and always-on Internet. That's a great
way to make J apps instantly available. "What would Google do?"
(a book title) It makes most of its apps web-based.
So... What EXE files?
> From: Matthew Brand <[email protected]>
>
> The inability to create an EXE file from a project is a key problem to
> using it in a commercial environment. Being able to give an EXE file
> to your boss would make it politically much easier for junior people
> to use J in a commercial environment.
>
> Usually the boss says what he wants the program to do, but he does not
> care how you do it. He usually does not know anything about
> programming beyond excel cell formulas will just want you to give him
> a file whose icon he can double-click or a button in an excel
> worksheet to click on to call a VBA macro. He absolutely does not want
> to have to (or have to sit and watch you do it) "setup", or "install"
> or "set the path variable" or "download libraries x,y,z" - he wants
> something that just works. He also does not want an update of
> seemingly unrelated programs/libraries to stop the program from
> working properly (as is common with Java - re the large font problem).
>
> If J had a way to create an executable file with no external
> dependencies then it would be easier to get people using it in
> commercial environments for in-house projects.
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Oleg Kobchenko wrote:
> >
> > Most of languages, even C/C++ (in shared DLL mode),
> > require more than one separate files.
> >
> > While single EXE, albeit a rare trick, could satifsy
> > a few developers, it not clear that it would be critical
> > to wide adoption of a platform.
> >
> >> From: Björn Helgason
> >>
> >> I see no harm in imitating VB and such if that is what people want to do.
> >
> > I don't think VB is just a single EXE--it requires VB runtime,
> > which is a number of DLLs, typically installed in Windows folder.
> > I had problems with that on machines, which did not have those
> > DLLs already present. To avoid this VB requires to make a setup
> > distribution.
> >
> >
> >> From: Fraser Jackson
> >>
> >>
> >> Bjorn wrote:
> >>
> >> > Lots of people do want it and over the year that has been one of the
> >> > primary
> >> > obstacles against using APL is not having a feature like that.
> >> >
> >> > Dyalog has given us this feature so in a way you could create a Dyalog
> >> > APL
> >> > application that would call J en create an exe.
> >> >
> >>
> >> R has been an outsanding example of development of a user community. In
> >> the
> >> first issue of the R Journal http://journal.r-project.org/ which has just
> >> been issued, John Chambers ( a major designer of S on which R was initially
> >> based, writes about issues being discussed here from the perspective of the
> >> R community.
> >>
> >> He states that the absence of the feature Bjorn has wants - ability to
> >> execute *.exe files from within APL was one of the primary reasons they did
> >> not base their development on APL.
> >
> > We need to be careful about mixing terms. Bjorn Helgason wants stand-alone
> > single EXE apps. And John Chambers referred to a totally different
> > limitation of APL--to call Fortran routines from within itself.
> >
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
> >
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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