Hi Charles. I don't have experience with VW, so I may be saying useless things. But in pharo, this is a good way of working from my point of view:

- You develop your app with a Pharo image (Pharo image -> PharoDev image), the one that comes with a lot of packages and tools.
- You create a Metacello configuration for your app which means that you can recreate and load all your application code and its dependences in a clean Pharo image.

As you may know, Pharo includes several packages which are kind of third-part libraries, this means, are developed by other people than the "Pharo Developers". The last ones, take care about, what it is called, the PharoCore. So...PharoCore is developed and maitained by Pharo developers, and it is a small image, core. Then, we load several packages on top of it, and we build the Pharo image.

This PharoCore can be considered as the PRE. At the moment of deploying an application, you can:

- Adapt your metacello configuration (if necessary) so that now your app loads also in a PharoCore
- Configure and customize the app. For example, you can change icons of the vm, and change stuff like that. Create a windows installer, etc.
- Lock your image for production
- Evaluate "ScriptLoader new cleanUpForProduction" which cleans a lot of garbage but also removes tests and things that you may not need in production. The idea with this is to have a smaller image.

You can also read: http://code.google.com/p/pharo/wiki/HowToDeployAnApplication

Cheers

Mariano

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 12:04 AM, Charles Monteiro <charles@nycsmalltalk.org> wrote:

first of all pardon my ignorance, trying to be a better community member but
I'm still behind.

Has the pharo team contemplated setting up the notion of an official "pharo
runtime engine" (PRE) , to be specific users would download the runtime
engine and subsequently only the "parcels" i.e. whatever the Pharo
counterpart is (.st file ins ?) is distributed to users.

Although Cincom does not officially support this, its actually quite simple
to setup and its the way I am accustomed to delivering apps. Many in the VW
community do as well. �I long ago abandoned the strip down model but rather
"build up". However, the runtime image is indeed an image stripped down of
development tools and etc. BTW, I also provide for a modicum of security by
encrypting the parcels.

thanks in advance,

-Charles
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