Is it possible to install third-party application alongside my application on my own application setup?
Let's say I were to sell some of my application, and in order to run my application on client's computer I would also need to run PostgreSQL. Is it possible to install it beside my application in my setup?
I am such rookie on that subject and don't really know where to start.
(I should mention that I am particularly interested on deploying Windows applications)
All commercial software will feature ways to help you achieve this as a built-in feature. Essentially you wrap it all in a setup.exe launcher / bootstrapper / downloader and this executable will install your prerequisite components before your own install is run, if they need to be installed.
Please see these answers for some further information on deployment tools and their features:
How to create windows installer
Simple List View of Deployment Tools
What installation product to use? InstallShield, WiX, Wise, Advanced Installer, etc
The open source WiX toolkit features a component called Burn to create such setup.exe launchers / downloaders / bootstrappers. Writing WiX XML markup code is necessary to use this Burn feature. Commercial tools Installshield and Advanced Installer provide GUI to build such setup.exe files.
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.
I have created an application in C# that relies on a specific driver (a custom virtual hid driver based on VMulti).
Currently, I have everything working and I want to combine both the application and driver into one installation package. As of right now, my application part has a .exe file and a .dll file. My driver has an .inf and .sys file, hidkmdf.sys, and WdfCoInstaller01009.dll (this dll is from the WDK). I am not able to install the driver through the traditional method of right-clicking the inf and clicking install. Instead, I use devcon to install it (command is "install inffile.inf hardwareid")
I tried using InstallShield LE, but I am only able to install the application, not the driver. After doing some searching, I found people using DIFxAPP to create the installation framework for drivers, however, I am not sure if this can be integrated into InstallShield so that the driver is installed during the application installation process.
So my main question is: What is the best and simplest method for combining application and driver installation into one package (meaning the setup.exe will install both the driver and the application)?
I am very new to driver development and application deployment, so any suggestions are welcome.
Thank You
EDIT: It is preferred that the solution does not require any paid tools.
Acctually, exists a many ways to implement this which depends on your Windows Installers skills.
You didn't specify target OSes for your application, that's why can I give you some ways:
PnpUtil.exe internal Windows 7 utility (only for Windows 7)
DPInst.exe included to WDK
DifXAPI merge module.
You can install drivers with help of all these utils via Custom Actions.
NOTE: That your driver SHOULD BE signed, otherwise you will receive error during silent installation.
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.
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...)