I'm writing a simple game engine that's based on CoffeeScript and I've been wondering if there's a standalone version of the compiler, so that the user wouldn't have to install both Node.JS and CoffeeScript.
If, as you say, the end product is expected to be a fully functional software package, you can always include whatever external dependencies you need directly in that product - like a package.
This is actually a standard for OS X and apps downloaded from App Store (mainly) - each downloaded app contains its own binary, but it may contain other required binaries as well. Games are also frequently architected this way (the obvious deviations being DirectX and .net runtimes which need to be installed directly into the system).
Alternatively, if the target platform is Windows, you could probably package the Node.js installer together with your own installer.
Related
I've compiled a cu program on my laptop, using NVIDIA CUDA 5 toolkit. A very basic interface, using only terminal output. Then I went on to test how it runs on my desktop PC (both have Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installed).
On the desktop PC I get this error message:
error while loading shared libraries: libcudart.so.5.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Ok, I get it, some libs are not installed. But do I really need to install CUDA toolkit on every PC where I'd want my compiled code to run?
To deploy a CUDA runtime API application on linux you only need to do two things:
Make sure that the machine in question has a CUDA compatible card and a minimum driver version which matches the CUDA Toolkit you used to build the application (you can find information regarding both of these in the release notes of the toolkit)
Distribute the runtime library (so cudart.so) that you built the application against with the executable. If you used any other libraries from the toolkit (like CUBLAS, CUFFT, CUSPARSE, etc) you need to inlcude those too. The CUDA runtime library is versioned and you have to have the libraries which match the toolkit you are building with. You may need to use the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to ensure that the correct versions of the libraries are found by the link loader. Often a simple shell script which acts the canonical application, settings LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable and running the built executable is the best way to do this.
If you get those two things right, it should just work.
I am developing an Outlook plugin solution that involves the plugin itself and a windows application working in tandem.
The plugin targets multiple versions of Outlook - 2007, 2010 and 2013.
The windows app uses different libraries for x86 and 64 bit processors.
Of course there are dependencies of both the plugin and the app.
In addition to pure installation, I would like to make automatic updates possible. It could be something as simple as custom code in the windows app to check for updates in a predefined location. But I would like to know my options.
The solution I have in mind right now, and which I would like to ask the SO community to evaluate is as follows:
Separate Windows Setup Projects (producing MSI files) for each combination of application and configuration (This could be as many as 8 different msi files)
One common bootstrapper project, detecting current system configuration and installing prerequisites and selected msis.
MSIs would not have prerequisites embedded in them, only the uber-installer/bootstrapper would have those.
Am I missing something? Is this solution viable? Are there third party alternatives to Windows Setup Projects that would make my life easier? Full featured Install Shield maybe?
In case this actually is helpful for someone, the solution I went with is the incredibly customizable installer solution: InstallMate 7 by Tarma.
You can find out more from their website, but the features that got me are:
Built in support for x86 and x64
Customizable prerequisites
Stand-alone update tool also provided by Tarma, which simplifies
automatic updates a lot.
PRICE! Forget about spending 5K on similar features elsewhere.
I am an ASP.NET developer, but now I want to build a software that can be installed on my PC. Software built in .NET platform only works when the .NET Framework is installed, and software written in Java only works if the JDK is installed. When I install programs like Firefox, uTorrent, etc., I don't need to have any frameworks (.NET, JDK, etc.) installed. How do I write software that doesn't depend on a framework?
You will have to use a language that isn't dependent on a framework or otherwise only target clients that are already have your framework installed.
If you chose C or C++ for example, you would distribute binaries to your client that contained machine code. This code would not be dependent on a runtime environment (like C# or Java) or an interpreter (like Python or Ruby). This is the way that applications like Firefox and uTorrent are written.
"When I install programs like Firefox, uTorrent, etc., I don't need to have any frameworks."
Actually, you do. They just tend to use the C++ frameworks, such as MFC, some of which are already installed. Even then, there are installers for these frameworks that are included with other application installers (usually called Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package or something like that. See Also: Visual C++ Deployment).
Now, having said that, they don't require a virtual machine (like a JVM for Java or a CLR for .NET), because C++ compiles down to x86 / x86-64 machine language to be executed directly by the operating system.
Fundamentally you always have a "platform", which is the operating system. Traditionally if you want to write code that will run on multiple operating systems you would use a fairly portable language such as C++ that produces native executables for a target operating system. Still, there are differences between how different operating systems work. There will therefore be parts of the C++ (or other portable language) code that are specific to that OS. You try to isolate those parts as much as possible to minimize the effort to port between OSes. Still, that effort is typically very substantial. You are also limited to the least common denominator of features available on all target operating systems (unless you create a custom version for a given OS that exposes its special features).
This is complex, time consuming and expensive. That's the reason technologies such as Java and .NET were created.
If You want to build really platform independent software You will finally end up with solution like Java Runtime or .NET. What You could do, You could thing about writing application in such way that You are able to compile/run it on most known platform, and of course then You need middleware to translate Your application's objects into platform objects (functions, whatever...).
I have seen solutions made in Pascal for DOS in such layer of abstraction that with little effort it was moved directly to Delphi for Windows without touching application logic.
Does anyone know of a good software development framework or similar that has the following properties?
Cross platform: it should be runnable on XP, Vista, OSX and common versions of Linux (such as Ubuntu and Kubuntu).
No installation: Be able to run the software from a USB stick without having to copy anything to the host machine.
Have good GUI support (this is why this question doesn't give a suitable answer, as far as I can tell).
Permissive licensing such as LGPL or BSD or such.
Among the softer requirements are having a set of abstractions for the most common backend functionality, such as sockets, file IO, and so on (There is usually some platform specific adaptations necessary), and supporting a good language such as Python or C++, though it is usually fun to learn a new one (i.e. not perl).
I think possible candidates are Qt 4.5 or above (but IFAIK Qt software will not run on Vista without any installation(?)), some wxWidgets or maybe wxPython solution, perhaps gtkmm. The examples I have found have failed on one or another of the requirements. This does not mean that no such examples exist, it just means that I have not found any. So I was wondering if anyone out there know of any existing solutions to this?
Some clarifications;
By "framework" I mean something like Qt or gtkmm or python with a widget package.
This is about being able to run the finished product on multiple platforms, from a stick, without installation, it is not about having a portable development environment.
It is not a boot stick.
It is ok to have to build the software specifically for the different targets, if necessary.
The use case I am seeing is that you have some software that you rely on (such as project planning, administration of information, analysis tools or similar) that:
does not rely on having an internet connection being available.
is run on different host machines where it is not really ok to install anything.
is moved by a user via a physical medium (such as a USB stick).
is run on different operating systems, such as Windows, Vista, Ubuntu, OSX.
works on the same data on these different hosts (the data can be stored on the host or on the stick).
is not really restricted in how big the bundled framework is (unless it is several gigabytes, which is not really realistic).
It is also ok to have parallel installations on the stick as long as the software behaves the same and can work on the same data when run on the different targets.
A different view on the use case would be that I have five newly installed machines with Vista, XP, OSX, Ubuntu and Kubuntu respectively in front of me. I would like to, without having to install anything new on the machines, be able to run the same software from a single USB stick (meeting the above GUI requirements and so on) on each of these five machines (though, if necessary from different bundles on the stick).
Is this possible?
Edit:
I have experimented a little with a Qt app that uses some widgets and a sqlite database. It was easy to get it to work on an ubuntu dist and on osx. For windows xp and vista I had to copy QtCored4.dll, QtGuid4.dll, QtSqld4.dll and mingwm10.dll to distribution directory (this was debug code) and I copied the qsqlited4.dll to a folder named "sqldrivers" in the distribution directory.
You mention wxWidgets but dismiss it as failing at least one of the requirements.
I don't know what your requirements are and in what way wxWidgets wouldn't work for you, but IMO it does fulfill them:
Cross platform: it should be runnable on XP, Vista, OSX and common versions of Linux.
It does run on those platforms, but "common versions of Linux" isn't good enough, as you can never be sure that the necessary GUI libraries for wxGTK (which should not be linked to statically) will be installed. This is however a problem for other solutions as well, unless you plan to put everything onto the stick.
No installation: Be able to run the software from a USB stick without having to copy anything to the host machine.
See the previous point, you would need to specify which libraries are needed on Linux. Also you could specify at build time not to use some of the system-provided libraries (for example for graphics, compression, regexes) but to use the wxWidgets-internal libraries instead.
Have good GUI support
Check.
Permissive licensing such as LGPL or BSD or such.
Check. You can statically link wxWidgets into your application too.
supporting a good language such as Python or C++
Supports both, and there are bindings to other languages as well.
having a set of abstractions for the most common backend functionality, such as sockets, file IO, and so on
It does have some abstractions like that, but you can link to other cross-platform libraries as well.
We use wxWidgets for FlameRobin, a graphical administration program for the Firebird SQL server. It has active ports to Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and has been compiled for at least some BSD variant and Solaris as well. It definitely runs from a stick on Windows, I haven't tried with Linux or Mac OS X, but I don't see why it shouldn't there too.
Java.
It has GUI support.
It provides your network/file/etc. abstractions.
It is cross-platform. Most platforms you can think of have a JRE available.
No need to install a JRE. Most users probably already have one, and if not, you can run the appropriate JRE right off the stick.
You can provide several startup scripts for various platforms to run the app under the appropriate JRE.
Something else to consider is HTML+Javascript. :D
You can look at Mono it cross platform, has GUI (GTK+, or Winforms 2.0) and I can execute code without installing.
This might not be crossplatform, but is maybe even better, it dont even use the platform : linux on a stick :-)
The subtitle is
Take your Java workspaces wherever you go on a USB key
Here with java and eclipse, but nothing stops you there of course.
http://knol.google.com/k/inderjeet-singh/installing-a-ubuntu-hardy-heron-java/1j9pj7d01g86i/2#
Well, it depends on what you mean by 'package'. Kylix came close to being such a thing. It was QT based, and it allowed you to write once and compile for Windows + Linux. However, it was not an open source solution.
I asked a similar question in this link
http://www.24hsoftware.com/DevelopersForum/CrossPlatform-C-Library.html
and the best asnswer seems to be QT.
I have started using QT, but it is not as easy as I expected mainly due to deployment problems due to the DLL hell, Winsxs hell and manifest hell.
Tclkit is a single-file, self-contained Tcl/Tk system. The mac version I have is about 3.8 megs. You can get a version for just about any modern OS. I carry around a thumb drive that has mac, windows and linux binaries so I can run my scripts on any platform. No install is required, just copy one file wherever you want.
The most recent versions of tcklit use native, themed widgets (though, on *nix there really isn't a single "native" set of widgets...)
I'm sketching an application deployment process for a bunch of relatively complex desktop applications. We have both native and Java apps, so the deployment must be able to check for existence of the JRE and install it if needed. Some of the apps depend on special hardware, so the deployment must also be able to launch the necessary driver installers. Some of the apps are multiplatform, and preferably the same mechanism should be able to create Windows, Linux and Mac OS X installers. That is:
The installer must be able to install, in addition to the application itself:
Java Runtime Environment.
Drivers (hardware) - that is, launch other installers.
The installer builder must be operable from the command line so that it can be integrated with an automatic build mechanism that generates installer packages for each platform as nightly builds.
In addition, I need to create "update from the web" mechanisms for the applications. It could be included in the installer, or it could also be a separate custom mechanism built into the application.
Now, this is getting a bit complex, and I suspect that there might be no single installer that could do this all. Therefore I'm thinking between two fundamentally different approaches:
Platform-specific mechanisms: NSIS would create .exe or .msi for Windows, XXX would create .deb for Ubuntu, and YYY would create .dmg for OS X.
Cross-platform installer that would handle all the requirements above: ZZZ?
Any recommendations? Some options that I've looked include:
NSIS - Excellent, but Windows only.
IzPack - Good, but requires JVM to run.
Is there an universal tool for this, or should I just pick an appropriate tool separately for each platform? In the latter case, what would be "NSIS equivalents" for Ubuntu and Mac OS X?
I have some recommendations as follows.
Use WIX (Windows Installer XML) for creating MSI installers for Windows
Use Package Maker (part of XCode tools) on MAC OS X, preferably the command line version
Write wrapper scripts (in Python or so) to drive the over-all installer creation process.
to aggregate all the components you need to install (may be from ur version control system)
generate necessary files for Wix and Package Maker as much as possible
to run the packaging tool and generate the package
Make sure that the overall installer creation process is a simple one command operation overall (with options to create different versions of your package based on criteria like release branch etc.)
Overall, developing this workflow requires some initial effort and quite a lot of thinking. But the end result is quite worth the effort.
I haven't done this on the Linux side, but I guess would use RPM/DEB on that front in this workflow.
BitRock InstallBuilder meets all the requirements, including being multiplatform and providing an autoupdate mechanism
You should take a look at InstallJammer. It will definitely handle the cross-platform elements that you want and can even add entries to the DEB and RPM databases on the target system during installation. OS X support is still experimental, but it mostly works.