Deployment of a Perl application

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Deployment of a Perl application by displeaser (Hermit) on May 26, 2005 at 12:00 UTC
Hi, I use perlapp from the activestate resource kit to great sucess here at work. The advantage of the resource kit is you can also create msi installer files, create services, tray apps, convert vb scripts and much more. It's well worth the money spent. You also might want to have a look at PAR and also tinyperl (which you can find here: http://tinyperl.sourceforge.net/ Supersearch is your friend. D	[reply]
Re: Deployment of a Perl application by smack (Beadle) on May 26, 2005 at 12:27 UTC
Morning, I found myself in a very similar predicament. For support and other various reasons, we were unable(unallowed) to install perl on many of our machines out in the field. We purchased perl2exe, and I have been very impressed. I’ve used it to build many executables, and never once had a major problem. When building, it has always included all modules properly. The only downside that I've found is a rather large executable size. You can get perl2exe here. The Enterprise version is a bit pricey, but well worth it. The evaluation works well, but has a 2 second delay upon program completion. They have it for many different platforms. Hope this helps! Best Regards, smack	[reply]
Re: Deployment of a Perl application by ff (Hermit) on May 26, 2005 at 13:11 UTC
I use PerlApp to bundle everything necessary up into an '.exe' file on Win32 and use Inno Setup to collect that file and whatever other configuration files and documentation I've made into one installation executable. (It would probably help me to check out using MSI for the installation-builder since I've got access to it through the PDK, just haven't). The Tk interface looks a bit old-fashioned to users, but it works. Don't forget to work up some kind of an icon for your program, e.g. 'Paint' for the bitmap and something like LiquidIcon to make the icon. BTW, it was suggested to me to try PAR instead of PerlApp. My own experience was disappointing: it took way longer than PerlApp at making the executable and the executable it made took way longer to execute. I don't know if it was the size of the program, its use of Tk, or what. I liked the 'free' part, as PerlApp seemed to be screwing up a Tk Text Search thingy and my guess was that any fix would have to be in the next, unpaid-for-by-me, release of PerlApp. Lack of cash and need for speed makes me stick with my current level.	[reply]
Re^2: Deployment of a Perl application by displeaser (Hermit) on May 27, 2005 at 08:01 UTC
ff, one big advantage of the msi installer is that you can distribute an msi file using active directory (if thats what your network is running) It can either be auto-installed or can be available to users for installation through Add/Remove programs. This can be realy handy if you want to distribute a program to 100s of users when 99% of them cant understand the concept of "next, next, Finish" :-)	[reply]
Re: Deployment of a Perl application by ghenry (Vicar) on May 26, 2005 at 10:59 UTC
Hi, I would do a [id://Super Search], as this has been asked loads of times. Search for `exe` Oh, is it a GUI app or commandline program? HTH. Walking the road to enlightenment... I found a penguin and a camel on the way..... Fancy a yourname@perl.me.uk? Just ask!!!	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Deployment of a Perl application by blazar (Canon) on May 26, 2005 at 14:22 UTC
We currently deploy a perl application a number of users, some of whom are not very tech savy and installing perl, let alone our program itself is too difficult for them. As a side note to all that has been said, I really don't know about your program, but installing AS Perl is really idiot-proof, and I bet that so many of those users already have their HDs so full of crap that shouldn't be scared of installing it too...l	[reply]