How To Integrate Bitrock InstallBuilder with Eclipse

Did you know that it is possible to integrate InstallBuilder into your development environment?

You may already be familiar with the advanced GUI builder that was added in InstallBuilder 6. You can access most InstallBuilder features from the GUI, so you can develop complex installers without writing a line of code. However, there are situations in which that is not the ideal way to work with InstallBuilder. In addition to the GUI builder, you can work directly with the XML project file or interact with the tool using the command line interface. Both the XML project file and the command line builder interface turn InstallBuilder into a powerful development tool that can be integrated into your development environment.

There are a variety of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) that support functions such as source code editing, compilation, automation and version control. You can also integrate the packaging functionality that BitRock InstallBuilder provides because most IDEs can be configured to use external tools.

In this article, we'll explain how to configure Eclipse to package your software with InstallBuilder. The configuration with other IDEs would be similar to this. This article is focused only on the basics - more complex configuration can be done to further customize your environment.

Great Week at JavaOne

We had a great week last week at JavaOne in San Francisco. It was great to meet a number of InstallBuilder customers in person. We also had an opportunity to learn about several cool new startups, including JRapid, which has developed a tool that speeds up AJAX application development, ScrumNinja, which offers a slick web app for managing Scrum, Micello, which has a cool indoor location-based-service on mobile devices and AgileIT, which makes it easy to add web services to your application.

I also gave a lightning talk on how BitRock worked with Logical Awesome to develop an on-site version of GitHub that is easy to install. The video should be posted soon and I'll be sure to provide a link once it is available.

As promised, we raffled off an EeePC, which was won by Frank from New York. Congratulations, Frank!

GitHub On-Premise Version Now Available

Last week, we announced the release of a customer's new product, GitHub:Firewall Install. Congratulations to our friends at Logical Awesome, the makers of Github, for the very successful launch of their on-premise edition!

If you're not already familiar with it, GitHub is a wildly popular web application for social coding, with over 80,000 developers already using the site. Built on top of the Git distributed version control system, it makes it easy for distributed teams to collaborate on software development projects.

Until now, GitHub was only available as a service, which made it inaccessible to companies that will not allow their code to be hosted outside of the corporate firewall for security reasons. After seeing increasing demand for an on-site version of their product, the Logical Awesome team approached BitRock to package the new version, GitHub:FI, for easy installation at customer sites.

BitRock developed a completely self-contained installer for GitHub:FI that enables new users to get up and running in just a few mouse clicks. The installer contains all of the software required to run GitHub: Ruby on Rails, JRuby, Solr, Java, Python, Perl, Git, Pygments, OpenSSL and over 30 additional components. It completely automates the installation and configuration process, so no manual setup steps are required. Logical Awesome is also taking advantage of the BitRock Network Service to better inform product development and support.

Want BitRock to make your software that easy to install?

Whether your software is built on PHP, Rails, Java, Perl or Python, we can deliver a complete package that enables even non-technical end users to have it up and running in minutes on Windows, Linux, OS X or Solaris. To learn more, contact our sales team.

How to Create Custom Pages with InstallBuilder

This week, we are kicking off a weekly series of 'how-to' posts for InstallBuilder, our crossplatform installation tool. Each how-to will include detailed instructions, as well as downloadable XML examples and (in most cases) a video demonstrating the process. In this first installment, we're going to cover how to create custom pages. InstallBuilder allows you to create multiple parameter pages: stringParameter, choiceParameter, booleanParameter... But what if you want a more customized page? Here is where parameterGroups come into play. parameterGroups allow you to define a list of parameters to be displayed in the same page and how to display them. This tutorial will be divided in 3 steps. First, we will design the page schema. In the second step, we will apply validations to fields. In the last step, we will perform actions based upon the user input.