AOLserver 4.0.10 on Win32 with NSIS installer

The downside of working for companies under confidentiality agreements is that I can’t openly talk about the cool stuff I’m doing all day long, but I still find an hour or two on the weekends to work on AOLserver, which I can talk about all I want.

The latest itch I’ve started scratching is getting AOLserver to build on the Win32 platform using the free and open source toolchain MSYS/MinGW. It’s part of an effort I’ve wanted to complete for a long time: to create a “batteries included” distribution of AOLserver that’s easy to install and get started on. I’ve packaged the build using NSIS, the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, which provides the familiar Windows application installer (and uninstaller!) that many people are familiar with. In other words, getting started with AOLserver on Win32 couldn’t get any easier.

In these early builds, I’ve included:

• AOLserver 4.0.10
• nsmysql
• nssqlite3
• Tcl 8.4.15
• Zlib 1.2.3
• SQLite 3.3.17
• MySQL Client 5.0.27

I hope to add the AOLserver nsopenssl (for HTTPS/SSL support) and nsodbc (to connect to any Win32 ODBC database) modules as well. I may include support for PHP 5, depending on how much effort that entails.

One big wishlist item that I’d appreciate help with is including some documentation with the installer. Jamie Rasmussen started working on packaging the existing docs up as .CHM files, which is the format used by Microsoft’s HTML Help Workshop (FAQ). I’d like to finally finish updating and cleaning up the docs we have and including it with the installer as a .CHM, too.

If you’d like to download an interim build, here’s 4.0.10-2 for your experimental pleasure:

• AOLserver-4.0.10-2-Win32-Setup.exe (2.7M)

Once I’m comfortable with the installer package, I’ll be committing my changes to CVS along with documentation on how to produce the build. Then, I’ll try to create another installer using AOLserver 4.5.

If you have bug reports, comments or feedback about the installer, go ahead and leave them in the comments below. Thanks!

Tags: AOLserver, Win32, Tcl, MySQL, SQLite, PHP