Creating Applications with Mozilla
by David Boswell, Brian King, Ian Oeschger, Pete Collins, Eric Murphy
Chapter 6. Packaging and Installing Applications
The previous chapters covered the basic parts of building an application. Now that you've seen how to create an application with XUL, CSS, and JavaScript that can be used on your local computer, we will show you how to turn your program into something that can be installed by other users. This chapter discusses the technologies Mozilla provides for packaging and installing applications.
Until your project is packaged for distribution, it can't be fully considered a finished application (unless it was designed to work only on the computer where it was created). Making your application distributable, installable, and registrable allows others to use what you have created.
This chapter is divided into four main sections. It starts with a quick overview of the basics of packaging and installing applications. The second section provides details about how to get your application packaged and described so that Mozilla recognizes what it is. The next section specifies how to put your package into a cross-platform installation file that can be installed over the Web onto other machines. The last section provides tips for customizing how your application will look once it is installed.
6.1. Packaging and Installing Overview
Several different pieces comprise Mozilla's distribution technology. In fact, Mozilla may have a few more moving parts than other packaging systems because it needs a way to package and install new software uniformly across ...
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