Alan Hudson wrote: > I've seen at least one post about this topic but I can't find a > definitive answer. I'm looking at using XPInstall to install an > application unrelated to Mozilla(at least for now). Its an X3D/VRML > browser which is currently a standalone Java application.
What do you mean by "XPInstall"? Do you mean the Mozilla component that processes .xpi files and their install scripts? Sure, you can install anything you want. The one drawback is that since there's no real UI capabilities you can't really ask users where they want to put things. There are a number of built-in locations, and on windows you can grovel in the windows registry for likely places as well. This is pretty simple and lightweight, but requires that your potential users be surfing with a Gecko-based browser. > My question is whether it will be that simple. Have others used > XPInstall for this task? I'm tired of using InstallShield. For this > release a standalone windows installer is all I need. Any experiences > in this regard? It sounds like you want something like the stub downloaders, which is built on XPInstall. You can do this, but there will be more overhead for a non-mozilla application. For Mozilla the only overhead is the 200K stub, because the "install engine" used (xpcom.xpi) turns out to be a core part of Mozilla that we would have installed anyway. For a non-Mozilla application you will still have to download xpcom.xpi for use as the engine but it will be pure overhead. Not that I want to discourage uses of our technology, but if you're already used to InstallShield what problems are you trying to solve? There will be costs to switching, so to make sense from an engineering POV the gain has to be worthwhile. -Dan Veditz
