Thomas Haws wrote: > Steven McCown explains in detail what was bothering me about using > Perl or Ruby. The reality is that those languages and the average > Windows box just don't jive.
That's a big assumption, but I can't deny it, since I don't know Perl or Ruby well enough. Chances are there's someone in each respective community who has made it easy to build Windows installers. > But Java does. Is there a way to do > this using Java? Sorry, but as Steven says, we have to consider the > end user. And the end user bought his computer at Dell or Walmart > with the default version of Windows pre-installed. But you don't really want to rely on whatever version of Java the user has installed, do you? That would be a support mess. To keep focused on software development rather than support, you need to ship a particular version of the JRE anyway. I just remembered that Plone has a great example of the kind of installer I've been talking about. You've got to check this out. Go to: http://plone.org/products/plone Just for you, I rebooted into Windows to try out the installer. :-) Roughly, here are all of the steps I went through: 1) The download link on plone.org redirected me to Sourceforge. I chose a download location. 2) My browser popped up the download dialog and I chose to save to the desktop. 3) When the download finished, I double-clicked the .exe file. 4) An installation wizard popped up. I clicked through the license agreement, which was the GPL. 5) I chose where to install it (C:\Program Files\Plone 2). 6) I was prompted for an administrative user name and password. I entered one. 7) After clicking "Next" / "Finish" once or twice and waiting a minute, the wizard said it was done and I closed the wizard. 8) I clicked Start | All programs | Plone | Plone (or something like that). 9) A little GUI popped up. I clicked the start button in the GUI, then clicked the view button. 10) A browser window popped up with a page served directly from my laptop, with "http://localhost/"; in the URL bar. Having accomplished my task, I then rebooted. :-) At no point did the installer look or feel different from other Windows installer. It didn't even tell me it was installing Python and a bunch of libraries, because those are technical details that don't matter to the end user. It's a 15 MB download, but that's because Plone is a big application with lots of bundled support libraries. By comparison, the JRE alone is 18 MB. We could use the Plone installer as an example, since it's fully open source. The GUI for starting and stopping Plone is also written in Python, so we can change it to work with the system tray instead or whatever. Mac support for Python is also quite good from what I hear, but I don't know the details. Shane _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
