Auto-update clients

[sil.li...@gmail.com]

Has anyone approached the updating of packaged apps? Is there a node or a framework to pushing updates to people using your app?

[Ewald Horn]

I'm doing something that's probably going to be frowned upon, but I'm pulling my app from the server every time the user opens it. That way it's always updated. In fact, I cheat a little bit - I build my web application and then just suck the code into a Node Webkit client, with some modifications that happen on the fly. That way my "desktop" client and web client are always in perfect sync.  My applications is not usable offline, so it makes perfect sense in my case to do this.

[Michael Winser]

I like this approach a lot.  My use case isn't quite as always-online as yours but I've considered having a bootstrap app that explicitly loads and caches the rest.  The reason I haven't done it this way is that I still need to solve the more general update case of updating node-webkit and some custom OS-specific binaries that I've built.

I've settled on a simple semi-automatic updater.  I publish the app's package.json manifest to a specific URL and the application periodically checks that against the current manifest.  When an update is available the app prompts the user and then downloads and invokes an installer on Windows.  On the Mac the "installer" is a DMG file and we just open that on behalf of the user and let them drag it to an Applications link

It's not perfect but it's working well enough for now.

Michael

On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 7:04 AM, Ewald Horn <ewal...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm doing something that's probably going to be frowned upon, but I'm pulling my app from the server every time the user opens it. That way it's always updated. In fact, I cheat a little bit - I build my web application and then just suck the code into a Node Webkit client, with some modifications that happen on the fly. That way my "desktop" client and web client are always in perfect sync.  My applications is not usable offline, so it makes perfect sense in my case to do this.

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[Ewald Horn]

That sounds like a plan Michael.  Just out of interest, the Windows 8 store downloads incremental changes to applications, so it should quite well with Node WebKit. 

Keep me posted on this, I'm curious to see other solutions, thank you for the update.

[sach...@gmail.com]

Hi all,

i came across DynoSrc while browsing the net. its for javascript patching. Haven't studied it in depth. ... just sharing here.

 

[Boyan O]

Hi, guys
I prefer to do it Google Chrome like - with zero action required from user. App probably could download all files required and save them to disk(by replacing old ones), about node-webkit binary updates - maybe we can do it same way... or request some action from user, like go to node-webkit github page(not sure if that is a good idea, depends on the project). I wonder can we use github for this as hosting platform(or github.io?).

Regards,
Boyan

пятница, 8 ноября 2013 г., 14:24:26 UTC+2 пользователь michaelw написал: