2

I'm writing a GUI application in C++ using wxWidgets. As I develop this, I would like to roll out updates to my customers in a reasonably light-weight and customer-friendly way.

My first thoughts were the traditional: go check a URL for a version number and if it's different from the current one, tell the user there's a new version to download (maybe present them with a download link).

Is there a more intelligent/customer-friendly way to do this?

Peter Mortensen
  • 30,738
  • 21
  • 105
  • 131
Jon Cage
  • 36,366
  • 38
  • 137
  • 215
  • Hmm... I guess this is a partial duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3711435/has-anybody-used-google-omaha-their-auto-update-engine-for-chrome – Jon Cage Mar 06 '12 at 12:11

2 Answers2

1

I found a potential cross-platform solution:

WebUpdate is a complete, open source, cross-platform update solution for any type of application. It provides an easily-integrable, small application which connects to a web server and shows the updated packages to the user (supports multiple packages) and let him download and install them.

Reliable downloads are granted using MD5 checksums. Local updates (for example, updates to be taken from a CD-ROM or any other device) are supported, too. The program is highly configurable using XML and XRC files. For a complete list of the features of WebUpdate, look at the WebUpdate documentation.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Jon Cage
  • 36,366
  • 38
  • 137
  • 215
1

See http://winsparkle.org/ (it's Windows-only but for Mac you have the original Sparkle and under Linux you usually rely on the packaging system for the updates instead of doing it yourself).

VZ.
  • 21,740
  • 3
  • 39
  • 42
  • Would that mean I'd need to make separate packages for each flavour of linux (I've only ever developed on windows or embedded platforms)? – Jon Cage Mar 06 '12 at 13:22
  • @JonCage AFAIK there are only 2 major package formats, RPM and .deb, which should be sufficient. – smerlin Mar 06 '12 at 13:30
  • Sparkle looks far more polished than WebUdpdate - thanks; I'll give it a look. – Jon Cage Mar 06 '12 at 18:12