Monkey In A Box

Monkey Archive Forums/Monkey Discussion/Monkey In A Box

degac(Posted 2014) [#1]
Hi to all

I'm trying to design a tool to help during the installation of Monkey's target SDK, setting the path, config file and so on.
I will use BlitzMax to create it, and as I have only Windows (at least a Linux on a VM) I could test only on that platform. This means no Mac/Xcode testing.

The main problem I found it's the downloading of each SDK.
For example, the JE SDK has not a direct link (well, not true, see below): the link (In the documentation) open the Oracle Java website: here you should 'agree' to download the desired version.

Well, you can get the direct link (a copy of the page link AFTER you agree to the license agreement...)

http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/8u5-b13/jdk-8u5-windows-i586.exe

but I'm thinking if this
1) is legit (the user didnt' accept the license agreement...)
2) is 'stable' in time (usually big operator like Oracle changes links sometimes... so it possible to break!)

Same for Android SDK (I think the package name/link changes very often)
And I dont' consider the time needed to download everything (in this moment I'm downloading the ASDK (510Mb) and I must wait more than 30 minutes...)

A possible solution is to host somewhere the package (ie: after downloaded all the package, I upload on my server them...), so the app download from that site that particular SDK version (this could means it's not up to date and I cant guarantee on the download speed)

Any other solutions or ideas?


Gerry Quinn(Posted 2014) [#2]
Doesn't seem any easy way to do it. Maybe it would be best if your installer just gave very explicit instructions, and said "come back here when it's installed, remembering the path in which you installed it".


Tibit(Posted 2014) [#3]
I think this is a great initiative.

I can't give legal advice, however can you not simply link to the agreement and clearly state that by proceeding you are agreeing to this agreement, like a lot of official and non-official installers does?

For the dl-links, have a local xml text json file with those in - check a web server for new version of the XML and download that first. Someone still needs to keep it updated, but doing so won't need a new release and users can help with this.

I do think it might be good that each step had a skip/ do it your self Button - in case something goes awry.


degac(Posted 2014) [#4]
In fact I was thinking to save online the list of links. When you start MIAB the list is downloaded (something I did in BM Companion). Of course there's the problem to keep up to date the links...
I could show to the user there's an agreement and the link to the SDK website page... (maybe when the SDK is installed something is shown about the EULA & so on... and so there's not a real problem... but in any case I will show some advice about this).

Well the idea is this:
- you choose what target you are interested in (Android, Flash, iOS and so on) (depending on the content of Monkeys' target folder)
- only that packages (if not already available in the download-install folder) where downloaded
- a 'download progress' will be shown ... so the user can understand what the app is doing!
- you can always force a re-download or a stop.
- dn links can be changed by the user if needed.
- downloaded files (.zip .exe or whatever) are stored in a folder: so - unless you delete them - the files are already 'ready' to be installed.

the next steps are installation and configuration.