FWD » Core Development » Runtime Infrastructure

I think this probably needs to be written as native code or at least as some native code. If we write all of it in Java then we can't necessarily diagnose issues with the Java installation itself.

I would expect that it would check the following (at least):

• hardware requirements
• platform OS and version
• software dependencies (e.g. JVM, libffi ...)
• configuration dependencies (e.g. pathing, able to load libjvmso/jvm.dll ...)

It would need to know what it is checking for, a kind of installation mode (application server, client, database server, conversion environment, development environment... or some combination of these).

The result would be a report of the status plus any issues found.

In any situation where a user is having problems with their installation, they can run this and send us the results. Or they can use it to diagnose the issues and fix them without us.

If you have any ideas on the implementation or on the items to be checked, post them here.

Does it make sense to take the extra step and provide a full featured self-installable package? This would be a native installation file for the target environment (Windows, Debian, etc.) the user would just execute. The install checker is already most of the hard work for such a package anyway.

My thinking was to implement a "simple" executable (32-bit and 64-bit .exe for Windows, 32-bit or 64-bit ELF for Linux) that can just be downloaded and executed without any install needed.

Does it make sense to take the extra step and provide a full featured self-installable package?

We are going to implement this as well. I just haven't created the task yet. :)

And the first thing the new installer will do is to run the checker code to confirm that the environment is right.

I guess we need to create the completely automated install program for Windows. At this time we can skip the Linux version because of Linux users specific. But for Windows we need smart and powerful installer with minimum interactivity. We can bundle all our pre-builds inside this package for the case when target system has no required software at all.

Eugenie Lyzenko wrote:

I guess we need to create the completely automated install program for Windows. At this time we can skip the Linux version because of Linux users specific. But for Windows we need smart and powerful installer with minimum interactivity. We can bundle all our pre-builds inside this package for the case when target system has no required software at all.

Yes, but this will be a separate task. The checker is meant for:

1. Determining if a system meets the hardware/OS criteria for running FWD.
2. Determining if a system has all the other pre-requisites installed and configured as needed.

I want this to be separate from the installer because it needs to be small and simple to download/run. It is meant to save us many hours of debugging/discussion with customers to fix their environments.