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Monday, September 12, 2016

Installable Web Applications

Hi Everyone;




    Here is another interesting new feature in the Appeon 2016 product released on September 9, 2016 - called the Installable Web Application or IWA for short! The IWA feature is automatically available when you upgrade your Appeon Server to the 2016 release. Once your PowerBuilder application has been deployed to the Appeon Server as a Web Application, you can now also deploy this directly to an MS-WIndows desktop user. The deployed IWA application runs like a locally installed WIn32 application. The benefits of an IWA are:
  • The deployment of your Appeon Web app should be more straightforward and reliable as you eliminate a key environment dependency
  • No longer require configuration of the Web browser plug-in.
  • IWAs are easier to launch since they are resident on the user’s machine and have shortcuts.
  • In terms of performance, response times are similar to the web browser model but IWAs will consume less client-side memory.

    Before you deploy the IWA application, you can complete the new IWA properties found in the Appeon Developer tool that is integrated with the PowerBuilder IDE, as follows:






  Once the IWA properties are completed, you can simply install the IWA from you web browser, as follows: http:////IAWRunner.html. The IAW Runner application will install like a any Set-up.exe into the client machine and become a launcher for your PB based IWA application. For example ...

           





When you update the PowerBuilder application on the Appeon Server, all the IWA desktop deployments are automatically updated as well the next time they start!

And basically, that's IWA in a nutshell! 

Regards ... Chris

4 comments:

  1. Thanks Chris!!

    Do you think that most corporate environments will allow this install or will they have to do something to allow all users to install it?

    Paul

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  2. Hi Paul;

    An excellent question! My "guess" is right now is that you would need local ADMIN privileges to perform the IWSRunner application installation. However, I wonder if that can be easily circumvented by adding a "policy" for this in your Active Directory?

    I need to do some more digging for you to get an exact answer. I'll post back here with more information when I get it!

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  3. Admin privileges are not required to install the IWARunner utility. In the short time since this new feature was released we've already had quite a few customers switch to deploying their Web apps as IWAs with great results.

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