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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Making deployment easier
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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I saw a complaint about how hard it is to deploy a Smalltalk (VisualWorks) application earlier today (in email). Now, engineering is working on this problem - the goal is to produce a runtime environment for VW that makes deployment straightforward. In the meantime, however, it's still harder than it needs to be. For WebToolkit apps, Alan has made it pretty simple - there's a simple set of options under the "web" menu once you load Web Toolkit. What about GUI apps? Well, I've been working on a simple tool for that today. I'll push it to the public Store once I'm done testing it - it should be as close to "press a button and deploy" as you can get. There will be two steps:
Seal the image (saves a sealed image, with a starting class/method specified)
Create a Windows executable, ready to deploy
The first step (borrowing heavily from Alan's approach) wraps the Runtime Packager, taking the simplest way through. If you actually understand RTP, you'll want to do it the hard way. The second step simply wraps the image compression and executable creation steps (Windows only) that are not as easy to find as they should be. I'll post on this again once I push the tool out