Comments on: Just How Important is Your Software Installer?

By: FollowSteph.com - How To Quickly Setup a Software Development Environment

FollowSteph.com - How To Quickly Setup a Software Development Environment — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 03:04:17 +0000

[...] than you might think. If you’re company already owns an installer like Install4J (which I’ve recommend in the past), then it’s a matter of an hour of someone’s time. And it shouldn’t [...]

By: FollowSteph.com » How to Save on Bandwidth Costs

FollowSteph.com » How to Save on Bandwidth Costs — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 02:53:07 +0000

[...] Late last year we changed the software we used to create our installer to Install4j (you can read my review on this great installer here) and it was able to drastically reduce our installer size by about 50%! Yes, that’s a full 50%! What does that mean? Well if you consider that the majority of our bandwidth is used for downloading the LandlordMax installer, then we were able to reduce our bandwidth by about 50%. [...]

By: Steph

Steph — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 02:56:02 +0000

Hi Marker,

You’re absolutely right, learning a new language is not that difficult. The thing is as a business owner, do you want to pay for someone to learn a new language, and possibly get proficient in it when you don’t need to, especially for a task that’s not done very often (how often does your installer script change once it’s done)?

As well, remember that this training cost has to be applied whenever the “install” person changes. It’s mostly a cost/benefit issue if it’s not a big part of your business.

The other thing to note is that your script (thanks for providing the link) is fairly small in terms of scope. It might not really look it, but ours is much more complex. For example, we actually install a local jvm with the application… I’d hate to figure out how to do all that with NSIS…

By: marker

marker — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 03:14:02 +0000

In your post you mentioned how NSIS is like a new programming language. Learning languages is not difficult for an experienced programmer. Every language is pretty much the same, just the syntax is a little different. I built a nice general purpose installer script using NSIS. I like NSIS because it is fast and they included a ton of sample scripts. You can check out my script here. I used the MUI (Modern UI) stuff of NSIS, which I like because it allows you to have a nice splash screen.

By: gman

gman — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 02:12:54 +0000

That looks great.

I don’t know if this one would meet all your needs as well as Install4J but I’ve been using AstrumInstaller for years.

http://www.thraexsoftware.com/aiw/index.html

It’s extremely inexpensive ($80), you can generally create an installer in minutes. It supports expansion through DLLs so if I need something complicated then I am free to add it in any language that can generate a DLL. It also supports automatic online updating for your application. It claims to support installing Java and .NET although I’ve never tried those features.