I recently lost a position I held as an installations developer with a company where I worked exclusively with MSI and InstallShield (well, ok, some InstallScript, but not much). I have since been hired by a company who uses InstallAnywhere, to fix what the company sees as a cumbersome and problematic install process. My initial instinct was to recommend scrapping InstallAnywhere and use InstallShield instead, but then I thought perhaps I should solicit some feedback from people first. To that end, here is some background:
1) InstallAnywhere has been used at this company because it is a Java shop, and they wanted to maintain a theoretical cross-platform compatibility.
2) This compatibility only exists in theory, since numerous development decisions have led to a software product that currently only runs in Windows anyway, and it is widely agreed that it would take several months to make this work in any environment other than Windows.
Given this info, can any of you provide me with any insight one way or the other? Is there any particular difficulty in making an installer for a Java app with InstallShield? Can I get the same range features from an InstallAnywhere installer that I can with an MSI?
As always community, many thanks in advance for your help.
Thanks for pointing me there. I guess I still have some questions:
For one, couldn't you bundle a JVM into an MSI? For example, make a merge module out of it?
Also, does InstallAnywhere have the version control for upgrades that MSIs do? The guy who's been doing our installer seems to think not, but that is the number 1 thing our deployment people want to see in an updated installer from me.
