As far as i have found out, it's possible -- and allowed -- to "link" and distribute a newLISP script with the newLISP binary to create a single-file executable. Now i would like to do this for an application using the newLISP gui server, much like the newLISP IDE, that is provided with newLISP. I have some questions related to this:
I would like to know what is required to build such an app and wrap it up just like newLISP IDE?
I have had a look at the packages contents and it seems, that there is some java-related stuff in there, to use/run the GUI server. So i think, i would require this stuff, too. Am i allowed to distribute it with my application, too?
The README i found in the newLISP IDE's package says, that the IDE requires some stuff installed outside the application package. I assume, this is only, because the IDE's lisp script is not linked against the newLISP binary?
thanks!
UPDATE
after further investigation of the newLISP-GS "app" i am not sure, if newLISP-GS is not only the GUI server ... ? i am little confused, anyway my question is still: how is it possible to build a single-file executable of a newLISP application including GUI-server and am i allowed to distribute it?
The guiserver.lsp and guiserver.jar files provide the interface between newLISP and the Java system that's installed on the machine.
The newLISP 'IDE' is, as far as I know, simply a longish text script that uses the guiserver.lsp file to interface with Java.
The ramifications of the restrictive GPL licence for distributing newLISP 'applications' has been discussed frequently on the newLISP forums, and you may find more answers and help there.
Related
This is a conceptual question and I hope it fits into Stackoverflow's question and answer style. I wonder what the concept of installing applications is good for. In my naive understanding of operating systems we do not need a registry and to use an application it should be enough to just copy the executable and files onto your drive and launch that.
Am a Windows user but also worked with Linux a bit and noticed that there are package managers instead of installers. But even those do more than just a copy instruction, I guess.
I do not think that all the installers exist only because the common user expects them out of steady habit. So what is the advantage of installers in contrast to developing applications which are designed to run out of a single folder and copy that over?
I would really like if someone could explain that concept.
Installing applications is a way to embed them in the OS. It's a kind of standard, you offer procedures like installing and uninstalling that should have the same functionalities for all applications (even "change" under Windows).
Countless times I've "installed" applications with a single shell script that came with them, and then had troubles removing such programs, having to look for single files. If the programmer uses the standard of the OS to make an executable that can be installed, that won't happen.
You can also easily view a list of the installed programs at any time.
Under Linux, additionally, if we're talking about a package manager, it is convenient for the user to have an easy way to download and install a program by just typing its name.
Last but not least, some applications are required to be installed and recognized by the OS (for example services in Windows).
I've heard that you can take a program that is already installed in a PC and go home to you r own pc and write a program in any programming language to make it work without having to install the program. I wanted to know how does one go about in achieving that.
The class of applications you are describing are called Standalone or Portable Applications.
In such applications all files that are required to run the application are stored in the same directory as the application file itself. Which is not the way with most applications work, so, you cannot make all applications run in that fashion. There are various guides on Google when you search for 'creating portable applications'.
You might want to look at a good directory of portable applications here
Is there someone that can suggest me a programming language that allows you to write quickly GUI programs (on windows platform)?
P.S. I am interested on only languages that do not rely on virtual machines and then have a compiler that produces executable code directly on the machine
I would go with AutoIT, it's a very easy to learn windows scripting language with tons of functionalities: http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/index.shtml
I'm using it to automate some tasks, but it can do way more than that.
EDIT
Just to make things a little bit clearer for everybody:
You can create new applications using AutoIT and the Aut2Exe compiler provided. The .exe files created are stand-alone, thus require no other files but the files that you might need in your app. Everything is free and the AutoIT scripting language has a BASIC-like syntax.
The GUI that you'll use are standard Windows controls. Among the functionalities you have the possibility to automate keystrokes/mouse movements, call the Windows API and external .dlls, manipulate windows and processes and through user created libraries (called UDFs) you can even acces local databases, manage networking tasks, encryption, archiving and many more.
All I can say is that it's worth take a look and the first app I built with AutoIT was done in roughly 8 hours since I started learning. It took a folder as the source and copied everything in a chosen directory, copying files in folders named as the date when the files were created. So the destination directory would have a series of subfolders like:
11.11.2010
whatever.txt
whatever.png
12.11.2010
archive.zip
and so on. Just 8 hours and got me rid of a lot of effort ordering the files myself.
Any .NET will probably be what you're after.
Start with VB.NET which is now called Visual Basic CCYY eg (Visual Basic 2005, Visual Basic 2008, Visual Basic 2010).
If you want something not using .NET framework, you might as well go back to older version of VB and if you want something compilable that'd be like C++ with their MFC (Microsoft Foundation Class).
You need to give more info on the type of gui and what you're using it for. This could be accomplished with Microsoft Access forms and VBA, or you could make an HTML Application (.hta).
I'll put in a vote for Delphi. You can easily write applications by dragging and dropping components on to a form and doing minimal coding in Pascal, which isn't hard to learn. Later, if you decide to go deeper, you can do pretty much whatever you want. And it compiles to native executable code.
Is an executable bundler, that combines the script with the framework/interpreter, good enough?
If so, you might look at Tcl/Tk or Lua.
http://www.powerbasic.com/
http://www.powerbasic.com/aboutpb.asp
Seems like it has a RAD GUI and of course it's BASIC, plus it compiles down to .exe (as I understand it.) Might be worth checking out.
A 'quick and simple' language will only allow you to do 'quick and simple' things - and for those, having a VM or not wont make much of a difference to you.
For quick and simple & native code, about all I can think of is RealBasic. Its cross platform Windows/Mac/Linux. I find their IDE to be difficult to work with due to its inflexibility and the help system last I looked wasnt that great, but the underlying language isnt bad and does compile to native code. So it might do the trick for you.
I am working on a job where we are developing a set of cross-platform applications using C++, Qt, and CMake (among other things). On the Mac we run into the problem that we need to package all of our shared libraries into each .app (currently there are 4 of them), which causes the size of the download and install to get large fairly rapidly.
We want to remain friendly to the Mac way of doing things, which means that we want to support the capacity to drag and drop applications. Does anybody have any ideas on how to do this while keeping the total size down?
The project is currently a set of four executables or apps that each use a common set of shared libraries (qt and in-house). There is also a set of ruby bindings that rely on the in-house libraries. I realize that you could probably create a Framework and install it in System/Library/Frameworks, but I haven't read about that much yet. Doing that way seems like it would break the ability to drag and drop the app between machines.
Does anybody know of any examples of applications that do a similar thing on the Mac? Any creative ideas would be most welcome.
Make an installer, preferably using the standard package maker which comes with XCode tools.
Having an installer for a suite of applications is not that uncommon. Apple's own iWork has an installer and shares libraries.
Making a standard .pkg is important if you want to distribute your app to a corporate customer: the IT admin would want to automate the install process remotely, which is possible for a standard .pkg but not if you write a custom installer yourself.
As for the file placements, you should understand File System Domains as described by Apple. Basically, all the directory structure is repeated three times:
/System/ : system domain
/ : local domain
/Users/name : user's domain
The first is reserved by Apple. The second is for things shared by users on a machine. The third is for a specific user.
The shared objects are put into directories called Library. So we have
/System/Library
/Library
/Users/name/Library
You'll typically install things in the last two. Inside Library, the directories should be organized as described here. Typically you put the frameworks in
Library/Frameworks/
or
Library/Application Support/your_app/Frameworks/
Have a quick project I need to put together for windows that can have no external references or dependencies; the stalwarts like C are obvious but if you are a .NET developer and need to build something like this very quick what language/tool would you use?
EDIT: Ultimately I want to be able to take JUST the exe produced by the compiler and put it alone on a windows machine and have the app run.
If you're a .net developer, you could consider something like using Remotesoft's Salamander or another similar tool that compiles everything into a single executable (including the framework).
This option lets you develop in .net, but not install the .net framework on your client's systems. If you're deploying on non-MS systems, you can use the Mono's deployment tools to accomplish the same thing for free.
In general, I'd say stick to the tools and languages you know. It's easier to build an installer to install the .net framework then it is to learn a new suite of tools, libraries, etc.
You can do it for practically any language (I'm excluding the obvious C/C++)
You can bundle the .NET runtime into your .exe and write the app in C#
You can write the app in Python and bundle everything into a single .exe using a tool like py2exe. I do this regularly. One can create great-looking and powerful applications with Python and PyQt, bundle everything into a single no-dependencies executable and deploy to users w/o a need to install anything else. The executable is a few MB large (~9 with PyQt), and loads and runs quickly.
Etc.
It's more important which language / environment do you currently know well. Focus on that, because the tools do exist for anything you'd want to use.
Delphi has always been the best product for producing stand-alone .EXEs for Windows. No Microsoft product has ever come near it in that regard.
I think a good allround answer to this is Free Pascal via the Lazarus IDE.
Free Pascal applications are native and dependency-free, and a lot of platforms are supported. Too many to list here! Free Pascal itself is a free and open source compiler.
For better convenience, I strongly recommend using the Lazarus IDE. Now you even get a RAD IDE for cross-platform GUI applications (as well as console), with a sizable set of builtin features, like database support. Really a pretty lovely all-in-one, often underestimated or even unknown, platform that produces self contained, native executables. There aren't all too many of those tools if you think about it. You can even cross-compile from it, for example to compile a GUI application for Linux on Windows, no virtual machines necessary.
One day, I wish .NET Native could get this far, but it is currently far from capable and I'm not sure if Microsoft even intends to go there. Google's Go language is also nice in that it compiles to native cross-platform code, but lacks a GUI library. Python can have its code packaged into executables but it's kind of a kludge and not native code. And so on...
C/C++ would be your language but don't use any fancy libraries like MFC, MSVCRT, etc. or if you do link them statically to your executable.
"No external references" is a bit vague. Are you talking about a deployment solution for an application?
For example, you can use Tcl which supports the ability to create a single file executable that contains both the application code and a virtual filesystem that can contain any other files needed by the application. If your goal is to create a single file that can be deployed without having to install extra files, read up about "starkits" and "starpacks".
If you target a Windows Vista .NET 3.0 is preinstalled,
If you target a Windows 7 .NET 3.5 is preinstalled, if you use no other libraries than the ones included in those distributions then you app will run. Installing .NET isn't really that much work anyway, just ship with the redistributable.
Assembler. Your only dependency is the CPU
Here's a left field answer...
Tcl
combined with starkits, you can create a simple double-clickable .exe with no need for an installer.
the downside, of course, is that it'll be written in tcl.
As an added bonus, you'll be able to port your app trivially to mac or linux (or a range of other odd operating systems)
Do you consider the .NET Framework "external"? If you stick to .NET Framework and use C#, your code should run anywhere the .NET Framework of appropriate version is installed, and you'll only need to deploy your .exe and .exe.config.
It is not possible to run a .NET program without the .NET Framework. If you can't require the .NET Framework to already be installed, then you cannot use a .NET program. That's what I meant.
I've no clue what the downvotes are about, but let me try once more to clarify. The original post said:
the stalwarts like C are obvious but
if you are a .NET developer and need
to build something like this very
quick what language/tool would you
use?
The answer is that if you are a .NET developer, there is no tool or language you can use for this purpose, as every .NET program requires the .NET Framework be installed. If you need a program that is entirely independant, then don't use .NET. As others have replied, you can bundle .NET into your exe. You can also have .NET installed with your application, if you're willing to ship a .MSI file and not just your exe.
But, by definition, a .NET program cannot be independent of the .NET Framework.