Some details
Incling specializes in building online communities to solve marketing, innovation and communication challenges. Incling came to Redwerk with a developed Java applet for screencast recording, which needed to be upgraded to a cross-platform standalone app.
At Redwerk, we like to keep our builds automated and our code clean and minimalistic – fewer lines means fewer bugs. Therefore, our obvious first step after a detailed
code review was to implement Gradle-based build scripts and use Maven repos to fetch dependencies. With just a few hours’ cleanup, we were able to shrink the code base by almost 15,000 lines. This also allowed us to execute the entire build process with a single console command.After the initial setup, our Java developers began work on creating the application, writing installation scripts, and fixing the translation infrastructure, all simultaneously. As the applet was already written in Java, it took almost no time at all to retool the existing code into a standalone application. We wrote our package and installer scripts using NSIS, launch4j, fpm, pkgbuild, and packr. Our solution automatically installs Java on the user’s machine if necessary and registers a custom URI handler which lets users launch the application by clicking a link on the web page.
We also implemented a way to seamlessly deliver version updates to users: whenever a user starts a new screencast, the app communicates with the backend to check if there are any updates available and updates itself in the background if necessary.
