prog | (no subject)

My continued failure to figure out how to deploy a Java application on Windows is holding up the entire volity.net website rollout, and thus delaying our search for money. I have been consistently enraged for about a day now. I have not been this angry at a computing platform for being an uncaring behemoth since the time I was forced to work with Oracle at Harvard.

I have found programs that will take my Jar and make an .exe out of it, and even some that make an .msi installer file out of it. This is a good start, but in every case the resulting program, if opened on a machine without Java installed, will not do the sane thing of silently downloading and installing Java, but instead tell the user that they don't have any Java and leaving them to do something about it.

And this is retarded. Most any non-technical user presented with a dialog nattering about unmet dependencies or (worse) thrown to an apparently random webpage at sun.com is going to include that the program is broken or virused or something, and will trash it without further thought.

Do Windows developers not know this? Do they just not care? Does working with an OS that is already user-hating in a thousand little ways desensitize you against not wanting to produce one more way?

SO ANGRY

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Downloading and installing other required components *silently* is evil. Give the user a dialog telling the user that you (the installer) need to download and install the latest Java, and give the user OK and Cancel buttons. You might recall the Mac blogs going nuts a couple of months ago when it was discovered that some apps such as PathFinder and Sandvox were silently installing Unsanity's Smart Crash Reports. One such blog was Daring Fireball which, as always, has excellent coverage of the topic:

http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/smart_crash_reports

If I can figure out how to do this, I will. I guess I didn't mean truly silently; the Java installer compels the user to click through a Sun license agreement before Java goes on the hard drive, and it would be good to throw up a dialog explaining why you're about to see this totally different company's installer dialogs for a while.