in an upcoming app that I am making, I am looking to bundle everything into a single exe for a windows environment. Over the years, I have seen discussions on 3rd party tools that would do this, but i am not sure if one is better than the others.
From the Xojo store, I see they have BoxedApp and Smart Packer… is there an advantage between the two or will they both provide the same options for compiling a single exe file?
when might decide to go for evaluation of on or another packer , please keep us posted about the results.
Hi Joost,
Yes, I have plans to evaluate both.
I was hoping to also get feedback from users who might have used these products to help me make a decision. I am looking for any gotchas or problems after customers have downloaded their product and users have reported issues.
@Rich Hatfield : 2 years ago I went with both, and both did not meet my expectations at that time and I gave up
Issues with the packers in relation to Xojo distracted me from the functional specifications of my software build with Xojo.
Curious how the sate of the technique is now.
I’m looking at BoxedApp now, I’d like an .exe to run from a usb drive.
I made a very simple little GUI app with just a button and a text box, click the button and some text appears and packaged it up and it worked just fine.
I wonder what kind of issues I will be fighting once I begin to access / create sqlite databases, include my own externally compiled DLLs, etc.
Based on your previous experiences, what kind of issues am I likely to find?
It’s long ago I went that path, with the same goal: having just one .exe on a usb-drive. Unsuccessful ! It seemed to work well with a small application, so I bought a BoxedApp license. Later in the development proces, when plugins, dll’s and other stuff came into play, it started being very buggy and I had to spend more time researching all the packing issues than the development itself. I gave up with BoxedApp Packer, but this was back in 2016. No idea what it’s technical status is today, but I notice that their last blogpost is from feb. 2019, so not much activity at that point.
Thanks for the info, I will run some additional tests with the external dll included.