Installer: time to make a state-of-art features for a 2014 software.

[User002]

It's almost 2014, time to make a state-of-art installer.

I think LabVIEW absolutely needs these features:

•  create a multi-language installer

make the dialogs translatable, or provide translated dialogs. This work can be done by the community in some weeks.

ability to create a 1 language installer, or multi-language installer (selecting which languages to incorporate).

The bootstrap installer will check the windows language and will load the appropriate strings for the dialogs. If the language is not present, english fallback.

PS: LabVIEW still has the problem of localization and globalization (runtime supports only few languages, built-in error codes are in few languages, no unicode, no easy tool for localization, no support for globalize application with culture-info formatting strings and dates, etc...) but this is matter of another idea.

•  add features to installer

Suppose you want to make a software made of 3 features (example: core, doc&examples, a plugin), and user can select the full installation (all 3), the custom or the simple installation (only core).

we need the dialog for this, and the ability to assign components to features in authoring

this is all pretty standard stuff nowadays.

• create a single file installer with embedded resources, exe or msi.

a single file is easier to download (1 click), we avoid tedious procedures like "make a auto-extracting zip files and run setup when done". A single MSI is a winner in enterprise scenario, where it can be managed better by sys-admins and their software.

• update check facilities

so software today is very changing: not only bugs, but according to Agile principles, today developers starts "small", and then proceed with increments and sprints, using tools like git, build servers, repositories, etc...

this is the way software is today.

if you develop software in a waterfall fashion....you are stuck in the 80s-90s, pretty much out of market.

So it is essential to have a built in update, at least an easy stuff.

For example, let developer specify a rss-like file on a server that has information about the latest software, and provide some vis that interact with that.

Don't you want to re-invent the wheel? Port Sparkle on LabVIEW (http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/).

This would be great for LabVIEW 2014.

I'll come back at august 2014 to verify lol

bye

[Intaris]

Search for "Deploy" from Wirebird Labs.

[User002]

ook

[User002]

I tried that software, sorry but it is still alpha.

[Intaris]

But I bet it'll be ready long before NI has anything comparable.....

[David_L]

I agree with Intaris that Deploy would probably suit a lot of these needs.  However I believe you are mistaken about it's "Alpha" status.  Deploy is fully released and available on the LabVIEW Tools Network.  You can download it and try it for free if you are skeptical, but from what I've seen it's a very solid product and the developer is constantly working to improve it.

www.ni.com/labviewtools/deploy

[Darren]

Any idea that has not received any kudos within a year after posting will be automatically declined.