On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 08:50, Stian Soiland-Reyes<[email protected]> wrote:
> It is however Windows users that have the biggest issue of not having > Java by default. As a summary for newcomers to the thread - the question is how do you make installation and first start-up of Taverna work, even if the user don't have Java installed on their machine. In Windows what happens now if you don't have Java is that you click run.bat - a black window appears, and after less than a second it closes again - not very helpful, unfortunately. Our main challenge is that as Taverna is a Java program, we can't just "pop up a window if Java is missing" before we are up and running in Java. You could crudely put PAUSE and ECHO and something in the .BAT file so that it doesn't just exit, with some kind of line saying 'You don't seem to have Java installed - see http://blablabla' - but it's not very user friendly (but still an improvement!) - for example the user can't click on the link in the console window. You could execute a visual basic script that can pop up a dialogue window and stuff - I guess all recent Windowses comes with Visual Basic installed now. There are also startup wrapper tools like Launch4J Richard is mentioning for Windows, which is a standard Windows binary that can detect if Java is installed or not, and then direct the user to an appropriate download site. For Linux I'm not quite sure what is appropriate, currently we use a shell script, but as Linux is becoming more user-friendly less people are used to digg down in a Terminal to start applications. Also some distributions like Ubuntu, come with Java, but it's a .. how can I put it nicely.. incomplete implementation. The users would still need to install Sun Java 5 or 6 to run Taverna successfully. Our plan is to release Taverna 2.1 beta 2 in a few weeks time, which functionally will be quite similar to beta 1, but with an appropriate installation procedure for Windows and downloads for different platforms, including an application bundle for OS X. -- Stian Soiland-Reyes, myGrid team School of Computer Science The University of Manchester ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Crystal Reports - New Free Runtime and 30 Day Trial Check out the new simplified licensing option that enables unlimited royalty-free distribution of the report engine for externally facing server and web deployment. http://p.sf.net/sfu/businessobjects _______________________________________________ taverna-hackers mailing list [email protected] Web site: http://www.taverna.org.uk Mailing lists: http://www.taverna.org.uk/taverna-mailing-lists/ Developers Guide: http://www.mygrid.org.uk/tools/developer-information
