You wrote this nice SWT application and you want to release it.
And you realized it is not so easy, especially if the user has to install it himself.
Yes, because there is a different SWT version for each platform: a version for Windows, a version for Mac OSX, a version for Linux... not only, but also different versions for 32 and 64 bits.
What you do? You build a setup file for your application for each platform?
With these thoughts, I wrote a library that does the job for you.
It is called OS dependent installer (osdepinstaller).
You call it from your installer or from your application and it installs the right SWT version for the platform where your application is installed.
It works in this way:
For example if the automatic choice of the platform does not work, the user is asked to do the choice manually.
A principle of osdepinstaller is to give all the information about what it is doing. In this way the user can continue manually if for some reason the library is not able to continue.
Since osdepinstaller cannot work without internet, and it can happen that the internet can be accessed only through a firewall or a proxy, the system checks with the user if there is a proxy and, in this case, if the proxy needs authorization.
To get data from the user and to show the status osdepinstaller uses by default the console (since it is normal that your application does not have a GUI until osdepinstaller has finished), but it can be easily adapted to other solutions.
Also, osdepinstaller is not only for SWT: it can be used for any library the is platform dependent.
Osdepinstaller is still in test, but you can download a test version and check the code.
I will use osdepinstaller to let the user install SWT with the generic installer of Matrex.
And you realized it is not so easy, especially if the user has to install it himself.
Yes, because there is a different SWT version for each platform: a version for Windows, a version for Mac OSX, a version for Linux... not only, but also different versions for 32 and 64 bits.
What you do? You build a setup file for your application for each platform?
With these thoughts, I wrote a library that does the job for you.
It is called OS dependent installer (osdepinstaller).
You call it from your installer or from your application and it installs the right SWT version for the platform where your application is installed.
It works in this way:
- it loads from the internet a file containing a list of links to download the SWT library from, one for each platform.
- It checks the platform in which it is installed (two properties, os.type and os.arch).
- it gets the link for that platform
- it downloads the SWT library (it is a zip file)
- it unzips the SWT library in a specific directory
For example if the automatic choice of the platform does not work, the user is asked to do the choice manually.
A principle of osdepinstaller is to give all the information about what it is doing. In this way the user can continue manually if for some reason the library is not able to continue.
Since osdepinstaller cannot work without internet, and it can happen that the internet can be accessed only through a firewall or a proxy, the system checks with the user if there is a proxy and, in this case, if the proxy needs authorization.
To get data from the user and to show the status osdepinstaller uses by default the console (since it is normal that your application does not have a GUI until osdepinstaller has finished), but it can be easily adapted to other solutions.
Also, osdepinstaller is not only for SWT: it can be used for any library the is platform dependent.
Osdepinstaller is still in test, but you can download a test version and check the code.
I will use osdepinstaller to let the user install SWT with the generic installer of Matrex.
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