| Re: IDL Virtual Machine--Forget It [message #63133 is a reply to message #63072] |
Wed, 29 October 2008 07:30   |
David Fanning
Messages: 11724
Registered: August 2001
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Senior Member |
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David Fanning writes:
> In short, forget about the idea of packaging your neat
> application up on a CD-ROM with the IDL Virtual Machine
> and handing it out to colleagues to use. Ain't gonna
> happen no more.
OK, here is the latest. I didn't get the straight scoop
from the ITTVIS Technical Support person I talked to,
although God knows I gave him PLENTY of opportunity
to get his story straight, even asked him to check it
out with someone else about five different times, but
he was adamant. Oh, well, my hard-earned support dollars
at work...
It turns out it *is* possible to create a CD with the
IDL Virtual Machine installed on it, along with your
application, and to hand that out to people who can
then run your application from the CD. No IDL installation
required. It is NOT possible, however, for Joe the Plumber
to download an IDL Virtual Machine from the ITTVIS web page
in the way it used to be done.
I am going to be writing an article about this with all
the gruesome details, but the gist of it is that you need
to use an IDL-supplied program named MAKE_RT to create
your IDL run-time or VM distribution folder. For a single
machine architecture, the process is fairly straightforward,
although I did spend an hour or so reading the on-line
documentation before I got started this morning.
And I had the usual problems of my program looking in the
wrong directories for resource files, etc. But that was
all fairly easy to sort out. (Details and suggestions in
the follow-up article.) But I did manage to create a CD
with my application on it, and I did manage to run the
darn thing on my wife's computer (pretty much the ultimate
test) successfully. So I'm a happy camper again.
According to the documentation, it *is* possible to create
a CD that will be able to run multiple machine architectures.
That's what I want, although I have to get to work before
I can test this aspect of the problem. I'm fairly confident
now that it is going to work. I'll let you know how it goes.
I will say that once I talked to the right people at ITTVIS,
I got a tremendous amount of help from them. I appreciate that.
I do think that this new way of doing things is not readily
apparent to many folks, both inside and outside of ITTVIS.
I'm hoping an article might help everyone understand the issues
better.
Cheers,
David
P.S. The entire distribution folder I wrote to the CD was
about 53 MBytes in size. Fairly hefty. But not so big you
couldn't stage it somewhere on an FTP site and let your
customers download it. I chose to let IDL to its default thing,
so the VM distribution has things in it I know I am not using.
I can eliminate these, and make a smaller distribution, by
modifying a manifest file.
--
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting, Inc.
Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com/
Sepore ma de ni thui. ("Perhaps thou speakest truth.")
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