web-downloadable merge modules

[chris_ire]

Hello!

I'm in the process of evaluating your product.

We're very interested in having a cross-platform installer. Not only would our installer be cross-platform (with different files for different platforms), it would also be multilingual (with different files for different languages) and multi-version (different licenses installing different files).

I know installanywhere 2010 could do this. My concern is that the resulting installer (*.exe) would be very big. Given that the installer would be downloaded from our website, this could be a problem for us.

What I was wondering was whether the merge modules can be set up to be independent from the main installer exe and downloadable on demand. What I would like to be able to do is create an exe with some files common to all versions and then have the other files downloadable from our website. In this way the installer exe would not be so big but would be capable of installing any of the variants onto our client's machines.

Is this possible?

Many thanks,

Chris.

[pv7721]

How big is big (I mean how big is currently your installer?) Nowadays, bandwith and diskspace are cheap. I've also seen some really big installers, like for instance the latest versions of VmWare Workstation, which are 500 MB. Is your installer bigger than that?

[chris_ire]

Vlad,

pv7721 wrote:
How big is big (I mean how big is currently your installer?) Nowadays, bandwith and diskspace are cheap. I've also seen some really big installers, like for instance the latest versions of VmWare Workstation, which are 500 MB. Is your installer bigger than that?

Thanks for your reply. At the moment, our main installer (we have smaller ones we want to incorporate) is about 30MB. The story is that we have 24 of them, making a total of 720MB (this is not including the smaller installers).

Do you know of a way to dynamically download modules from the web using installanywhere 2010?

[pv7721]

I'm not sure that this has been natively added to IA, so you may need to write custom code for that.

[chris_ire]

pv7721 wrote:
I'm not sure that this has been natively added to IA, so you may need to write custom code for that.

Ok, thanks again.

Just one last thing - can you please point me to an example of such code or tutorial/whitepaper I could read on the subject?

[pv7721]

First, you have the manual (even in the unregistered version), then you've got the API Javadoc, and finally you've got some plugins (ready-made custom code that you can integrate in your installer, available from here: http://www.flexerasoftware.com/products/installanywhere/files-utilities.htm
Finally, if you need a paper reference, I would recommend this (little outdated and out of print): http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0321246101/ref=dp_olp_all_mbc?ie=UTF8&qid=1283869852&sr=8-1&condition=all

[chris_ire]

Vlad,

pv7721 wrote:
First, you have the manual

Ok, thanks very much for your help!