![]() Desktop Integration: VMware InstallBuilder installers provide native look and feel anddesktop integration for Windows, OS X and Linux (KDE and Gnome).Multiplatform Support: VMware InstallBuilder installers are native binaries that can run on Windows, OS X and Linux and most otherflavors of Unix, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, AIX, OS/400, HP-UX and IRIX.InstallBuilder is a fully-featured tool capable of addressing multiple installation scenarios, from desktop games toengineering simulation tools to enterprise-level server software. In those cases, InstallBuilder provides a choice between the most common toolkits, Qt and GTK, aswell as a built-in fallback mode. On Linux and other Unix platforms, there is not a single standard look and feel. Installers created with InstallBuilder use theunderlying system libraries for displaying their GUI interfaces, so users get a native look and feel foreach platform the installers run on, such as Windows and Mac OS X. Inaddition to this, the installers do not perform a self-extraction step, meaning that they start up instantaneously, whereassome Java-based installers can take up to minutes to initialize for large installers. ![]() This means that the overhead theinstaller introduces is very small, typically around 2 to 3 Mb, versus the 15 Mb to 20 Mb that a bundled JRE requires. So, how does InstallBuilder address these issues? Installers generated withInstallBuilder are native applications that do not require any runtime to be present in the system to run. The above is not intended as a rant against Java-based installers, rather as an illustration of the challenges that a crossplatform installation tool faces. End-users react much more favorably to setup applications that are responsiveand provide a familiar native interface, even if the functionality is identical. Finally, andalthough alternative toolkits like SWT finally emerged, Java GUI development has traditionally suffered from poorperformance and lack of a truly native look-and-feel. For large installers, this can be a time-consuming step andanother source of installation-related issues if the end-user runs out of disk space during this process. Java-based installers also require a self-extraction step, in which thefiles are first unpacked to disk before installation can begin. For example, it requires a Java runtime environment to be present in themachine, which increases the chances of something going wrong if one is not present or the one present is not a suitable version.Alternatively, if the user decides to bundle a JRE with the installer in order to avoid these potential problems, it will increasesignificantly the footprint of the installation. However, it has a set ofmajor drawbacks when the goal is to create setup programs. Java is a fine choice for multiplescenarios and indeed over half of your users use InstallBuilder to package Java-based applications. These were built using the Java programming language. To fully understand the architecture and capabilities of InstallBuilder, it is useful to consider the previous generation ofcross-platform installers.
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