Deployment Tool

I mentioned yesterday that I was working on a simple deployment tool for VisualWorks. Well, I've just posted it to the Public Store - the package is called Deployment. Here's a short description:

A Very simple deployment tool. It wraps the complexity of RTP (by avoiding most of its features) to allow for a fairly simple way of creating a sealed image and a Windows executable. There are 3 steps:

1. Seal the image. This assumes that you have an image ready to be sealed. You startup Deployment.DeploymentToolUI, fill in the image name you want (NOT the same one you last saved the working one with :) ), the startup class, and the startup method. Specify the namespace using dotted notation. Then hit "Seal Image". That will save the image without doing any stripping.
2. After that's done, bring up a working image with the deployment tool loaded. Start it up, and compress the image. This will create a smaller image that can be combined with the VM for a single Windows exe
3. After that's done, the last button will create the executable.

That's it. If you know how to use the RTP, you can create a smaller, more efficient runtime with it - but this works fairly well, and is very simple. Enjoy, and report any issues to me