WebUpdate

A powerful and flexible cross-platform update solution
by Francesco Montorsi

WebUpdate features

• Open source: wxWidgets-licensed; see http://www.wxwidgets.org/licence.php.

• Cross-platform, using the wxWidgets library; see http://www.wxwidgets.org.

• Ability to update any kind of application: also not wxWidgets-based and not written in C++; see The samples of WebUpdate.

• Easily integrable in your application: needs only few modifications; see The WebUpdate tutorial.

• Small: the binary for win32 distributed at https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=51305&package_id=45182 is about 500 Kb.

• Handles an arbitrary number of packages.

• Allows platform-independent set of installation actions for each package.

• Extensible GUI: it can be modified without recompiling the application (using the wxWidgets XRC system). This also means that you can choose among various GUI masks (some are better for simple programs with few packages, others are better for big programs with many packages) or just create your own.

• Extensible configuration files: the local & remote XML files (see The WebUpdate tutorial for an explanation of this terminology) allows you to configure the behaviour of the updater.

• Extensible actions: the actions which are taken when downloading each package can be chosen by the programmer who writes the remote XML file and updater allows you to define new actions just deriving a C++ class. See How to create a new custom action page.

• Ability to update itself: see How to update the WebUpdater.

• Optional MD5 checks on the downloaded file to avoid data corruption.

• Ability to download the updates & the remote XML file from any source: World Wide Web is the typical location but the WebUpdater can be configured to use the packages stored in any device (CD, DVD, floppies or whatelse). See the FAQ 2) How can I use WebUpdate to take the update packages from a non-http resource ?.

• Allows many properties to be set for each package: the 'importance', the platform which it targets, the description, its dependencies on other packages

• The DTDs allows you to easily check your XML files: see The Local XML WebUpdate DTD and The Remote XML WebUpdate DTD.

Let's start...

Don't start to dig in the doxygen documentation of the classes & functions of WebUpdate; you probably will never need to do that ! Just read The WebUpdate tutorial and enjoy WebUpdate.

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