27 March 2007

How To Make Your Own Web Installer Part I - Jumptree Project Installer Demostration

In the last few months, I've seen several people searched “web installer” from search engines and stumble crossed my web site. Unfortunately, I never went into details of how a web installer works, I sincerely hope those who left found their solution eventually.

When we started Jumptree Project Management, one of the core requirements is to simplify the process of installing a web application. We understand the pain of our customers might have to go through to manually edit a whole bunch of configuration properties and believe me; I’ve wanted to do that for a long time, just never had a chance to create one till we created our Jumptree Software. The requirements for us are simple

Connect to an IP and list out the exisiting databases in that IP
Dump the raw .sql files into the database user selected
Hook up License checker
Create a default "administrator" user
Set up email smtp settings

So I want to start a series of posts describing how to create a web installer, of course, I will skip the License checker as it goes beyound the scope I want to cover here. To get your curiosity started, below are the screen shots of our Jumptree Project Management Installer. If I see enough interests, then I will prioritze the series over other things I'm doing and finish it a bit quicker. Just let me know and post a comment.