Status Update

Hello again. Sorry for the delays. I've been brainstorming with my mentors and Paul about some of the intricacies of the Windows installer. The nice thing about Linux is that dependencies can be checked via built-in command line utilities in a very straightforward fashion. On Windows, however, that is far from the case. The abilities of DOS BATCH scripting range somewhere between 0 and Useless.

While looking at some of the scripting options out there that have been designed for installer applications, I was again not pleased. NSIS seems to be a popular one, but the scripting language is really complex (and un-necessarily so). This led me to just cook up some Java code that executed the version commands of each of the depends and then did some string manipulations in order to extract the version numbers. This is the same way the Linux version handles this issue. Also, in this process, I'm aiming to stay away from looking at the Registry because that would be a downfall of XP to Vista functionality. For example, the Java entries aren't even remotely the same between the two operating systems.

The real problem will come with MySQL and Tomcat because 1. MySQL doesn't add itself to the users path variable, so we can't directly execute the command and 2. Tomcat is really difficult to check for version info; even on Linux it's a bit hackish but effective. The issue will be trying to achieve that same goal on Windows, but by looking at the files that Tomcat uses on Windows as compared to Linux, that may not be possible.

So, that's where I am for now, sort of spinning my wheels at this point looking for the best solution. I like to think out my problems before getting too involved in actually coding something up as to not waste any effort, but nonetheless progress is being made. I'm gearing up for my visit with the OpenMRS guys next week, so that should be a very productive day and I anticipate a lot of working getting done there. I'll keep you guys posted, take care.