Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Zocalo 2006.5 released: Installer for Windows

I've released a new version of the Zocalo Prediction Market Toolkit. Zocalo now has an installer for Windows. This should make it simple to install the prediction market version on Windows platforms. If you've already installed, there's nothing else worth upgrading for, but if you were waiting for a simpler install on Windows, this is it.

The 2006.3 release was the first to support deployment on Windows, but it was packaged as a .zip file with manual instructions. I got a couple of requests for a windows-style installer, so I figured out how to build one using the open source NSIS package. It took me a week and a half to get everything right, but I think the result is worth it. It's a professional looking installer that prompts for some configuration parameters, and verifies their values before inserting them in a configuration file.

I didn't make an installer for the experiment version. If you've been holding off installing that because of a perception that installing on Windows from a zip file was going to be too hard, let me know. I'd guess that building another installer will take a few days now that I've figured out all the quirks of NSIS that mattered for Zocalo.

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