I am evaluating InstallAnywhere for installing our J2EE product along with JVM and App Server (and perhaps DB and DLLs).
A few questions: 1) Does it have a scripting language or configuration file (e.g. XML) as WIX ?
2) My builds are done on Solaris box via ANT scripts from ClearCase, but the end product is supposed to run only on Windows. Can IA 2009 support that configuration? Can IA be a part of nightly ANT build ? Do I have to buy an Enterprise version only for that [on solaris for windows]?
3) Can I have an output as MSI file, not EXE ?
4) Can we build a template file, and have our support guy to login (via web) and build customized installation (for this client select these components, set up these installation dirs, use this logo, etc), e.g. have custom installations ?
1) IA projects are enhanced XML files (but manually editing them is not something for the faint of heart (i.e. not supported))
2) Yes, you can use IA on Solaris to produce Windows setups. I think you should look at the differences between Standard and Enterprise versions in order to decide which one is best for you (but I personally Enterprise is best, as it has no limitations when compared to the Standard version).
3) No, IA cannot produce MSI, it only produces .exes (for Windows) (the reason for this being that IA it's Java based and multiplatform)
4) I'm afraid not, you cannot have this natively (but I guess you could build yourself a framework supporting that, which would build an installer based on given components)
