Is it possible to install CAB file on PPC device after sync?

Question

Hello everyone,
I've been working with Oracle Lite for over a year and a half now developing a PocketPC application. It's working well and expanding fast. As such we have many application updates that happen every few days. Right now we distribute the application by packaging everything (.NET framework, Oracle Lite client and our application) in a desktop installer. This works great except that it doesn't work well with our quick update schedule.
So my question is what is the simplest way (if at all possible) to distribute our application CAB file through the mobile server. Basically all I need is to have the client download the new CAB file, uninstall the old version and then execute the CAB file and install the new application. Nothing fancy I think. I would prefer if it would be as simple as dropping the CAB file in some folder on the mobile server. I've read something about INF files in the documentation but as usual that is way too brief to make it useful.
If anyone can let me know how I can do this I would really appreciate it.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi, I'm also developing for PPC platform on Oracle Lite. Did you consider deploying the application as a plain set of files? When I was making the decision whether to CAB or not to CAB, I decided not to use CAB deployment and deploy our application as a plain set of files with installation steps described in the setup.inf file you mentioned. We also perform updates frequently, but we almost never update all the modules - just one of two files at the moment which makes quite small amount of data in comarison with the huge CAB which would need to be transfered to the device if we use the CAB deployment.
The documentation contains some useful information about the setup.inf format - it's quite easy to understand and use. First of all you have to create a JAR package (which is just renamed zip file) containing your application files plus the setup.inf file and web.xml file. Than you have to publis this application using the mobile server web interface. After this initial step, mobile server creates a directory for your application in {OLITE_HOME}\mobile_oc4j\j2ee\mobileserver\applications\mobileserver. If you wish to publish a new version of your application than, you just copy the new files (or single CAB) and increment the version number in setup.inf file.
I think you can find setup.inf and web.xml samples in the forum's history. If you won't be able to find them, I can post some examples....