Chapter 10. Ship it!
This chapter covers
- Packaging your application
- Packaging with the Installer plugin
After spending a good amount of time having fun building a Griffon application, suddenly you realize you must somehow deliver the application to your users. And building an application takes time, even if you use the Griffon framework—after all, the application doesn’t write itself, does it? There are many options for packaging an application—which ones will be best suited for your needs? Memories of painful packaging experiences may start to flow...
The good news is that packaging an application is a task common to all applications, and Griffon provides packaging support out of the box. With Griffon, you get a few choices that should get you out of trouble quickly. But if you require a packaging option that packs more power, the solution is just one plugin install away.
In this chapter, we’ll explore packaging options and packaging targets. We’ll also walk you through using the Installer plugin.
In chapter 2, we discussed using the Griffon configuration file, BuildConfig.groovy, to determine which options to use when building an application. Turns out some of those options control how some files are generated, particularly the applet and web-start support files. It should come as no surprise that those configuration options are reused when packaging the application for distribution.