Patent Application
20060230397
1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to the field of software installation. More particularly, the present invention provides a method, computer program product, and system for registering a group of software components collectively.
2. Description of the Related Art
The current business environment favors marketing software as part of a solution rather than as stand-alone products. Under this approach, a “solution” may comprise a plurality of individual software products that are intended to be used together. For example, a computer software package for authoring and electronically filing patent applications may include a set of word processor macros for use in authoring an application, an imaging software package to convert the authored patent application into a form suitable for electronic filing (through the United States Patent and Trademark Office's Image File Wrapper system, for example), and a packing and validation engine for validating, packing, and filing the electronic application. Each of these programs may be produced by multiple vendors, but assembled into a single solution for delivery to a client.
This solution-based software marketing strategy does not necessarily fit well with current methods of software purchasing, licensing, and registration. Traditional methods dictate that each software component install and register itself. This runs counter to the solution-packaging approach where the registration should reflect the overall deliverable. This situation becomes even more complicated when the solution is packaged by a third-party provider using a variety of underlying components.
UML activity diagrams are typically divided visually into “swimlanes,” each separated from neighboring swimlanes by vertical solid lines on both sides. According the UML Specification, version 1.5, “swimlanes are used to organize responsibility for actions and subactivities.” Each swimlane represents a different actor within the system, and an action in an activity diagram is associated with a particular actor by being located within the swimlane corresponding to the appropriate actor. When UML is used to model software systems, each swimlane is usually associated with a different object or process in the system. The relative ordering of the swimlanes has no semantic significance. (See Object Management Group, OMG Unified Modeling Language Specification, version 1.5, March 2003, pp. 3-161-3-162).
Each of swimlanes 102, 104, 106, and 108 represents a different actor in the install process. Swimlane 102 represents an overall installer program or installation script. Swimlanes 104 and 106 represent individual installers for different software components or applications being installed as part of an overall solution. Swimlane 108 represents a system registry and/or one or more license or other registration files associated with the install process. For example, in the MICROSOFT WINDOWS operating system, swimlane 108 might represent the Windows system registry, which is a database of information regarding the various programs installed on a particular computer and their various settings. As one skilled in the art will recognize, various forms of system registries exist in the art, such as the component installation registries used in various versions of the Linux operating system (e.g., Red Hat Package Manager [RPM], Debian package tool, etc.), and the like.
Returning now to the specifics of
Similarly, with respect to the installer for application 2 (swimlane 106), the application itself is first installed (action 124). Next, the application is registered with the system (action 126). As with application 1, this involves generating registry information (object 128) and adding this information to the system registry or license files (action 130 in swimlane 108).
The overall install process ends with the termination of the overall package installer (swimlane 102), as denoted by join symbol 132 and termination state 134.
As can be seen from
What is needed, therefore, is a method for registering software components as a unified solution, rather than simply as individual components. The present invention provides a solution to these and other problems, and offers other advantages over previous solutions.
The present invention provides a method, computer program product, and data processing system for installing and registering software components as part of a unified solution, rather than simply as individual software components. According to a preferred embodiment, an installer supplies specific registration information as part of its overall installation process. This registration information overrides that used by the native component install technology to register the solution/component, as appropriate. In a preferred embodiment, the standard registration information provided by each software component's individual installer program is removed by an installation wrapper script and replaced by registration information that pertains to the installed solution as a whole. This registration scheme may just be characterized as a form of “late binding” of registration information.
The foregoing is a summary and thus contains, by necessity, simplifications, generalizations, and omissions of detail; consequently, those skilled in the art will appreciate that the summary is illustrative only and is not intended to be in any way limiting. Other aspects, inventive features, and advantages of the present invention, as defined solely by the claims, will become apparent in the non-limiting detailed description set forth below.
The present invention may be better understood, and its numerous objects, features, and advantages made apparent to those skilled in the art by referencing the accompanying drawings, wherein:
The following is intended to provide a detailed description of an example of the invention and should not be taken to be limiting of the invention itself. Rather, any number of variations may fall within the scope of the invention, which is defined in the claims following the description.
At this point, some observations about the meanings of some of the terms utilized in this description and the accompanying claims should be made. Firstly, the term “component” or “software component,” where it is used to denote something that is being installed, may refer to a application or other form of executable software program, but the term is not limited to programs, as such. “Component” should also be interpreted to refer to libraries (such as dynamically-linked libraries or “DLLs”), applets, scripts, and other items of executable code that are not, by themselves, programs. Further, the term “component” should also include items of data that are not executable code, but that may, nonetheless, be installed in a similar manner to executable programs. For instance, a dictionary of technical or legal terms for use with a spelling checker program is one example of a non-program component that may be installed for use as part of a software solution.
The term “native,” as used herein, also requires some explanation. In the document, the term “native,” as used in the context of a “native installer,” refers to the fact that the installer is that which is associated with the particular application or component being installed. As an illustrative example, in the context of a solution that is composed of multiple third-party components, the “native” installer of a given component is the installer that “comes with” that third-party component (i.e., the one supplied by the third-party that produced the component). The term “native” is used here to distinguish the installer supplied with the third-party component from installation software (such as wrapper component 208) that is supplied by the party that assembled the packaged solution. The term “native,” as used herein, should not be confused with the term “native code,” where that term is used to distinguish platform-independent code (such as source code in a portable programming language such as C) and code that is specific to a given computing platform.
Returning now to the figures,
In this preferred embodiment, the first task of the application installer wrapper (swimlane 304) is to invoke the “native” application installer for the application that the application installer wrapper is to coordinate the installation of (action 318). The native application installer (swimlane 306) installs the actual application (action 320) and performs application-specific registration of that application (action 322), as if the application were being installed as a stand-alone application. This entails generating application-specific registration information (object 324) and adding that information to the system registry or one or more license files (action 326 in swimlane 308). Note that this is the normal operation of the native application installer. Thus, in order for a third-party application to be incorporated into a packaged solution, there is no need to actually modify the native application installer provided by that third-party vendor, as will become clearer below.
Once the native application installer has completed the normal installation process for a particular application, the application installer wrapper initiates a process of registering the now-installed application as being a component of the overall package being installed, rather than as a stand-alone in application (action 328). This entails first removing the application-specific registration information that was added to the system registry or license files in action 326 (action 330). New registration information corresponding to the packaged solution as a whole is generated by the application installer wrapper (object 332) and that information is used to replace the application-specific registration information that was added to the system registry or license files in action 326 (action 334). Finally, the process terminates at the overall package installer (swimlane 302), as denoted by join symbol 336 and termination state 338.
PCI bus 414 provides an interface for a variety of devices that are shared by host processor(s) 400 and Service Processor 416 including, for example, flash memory 418. PCI-to-ISA bridge 435 provides bus control to handle transfers between PCI bus 414 and ISA bus 440, universal serial bus (USB) functionality 445, power management functionality 455, and can include other functional elements not shown, such as a real-time clock (RTC), DMA control, interrupt support, and system management bus support. Nonvolatile RAM 420 is attached to ISA Bus 440. Service Processor 416 includes JTAG and I2C buses 422 for communication with processor(s) 400 during initialization steps. JTAG/I2C buses 422 are also coupled to L2 cache 404, Host-to-PCI bridge 406, and main memory 408 providing a communications path between the processor, the Service Processor, the L2 cache, the Host-to-PCI bridge, and the main memory. Service Processor 416 also has access to system power resources for powering down information handling device 401.
Peripheral devices and input/output (I/O) devices can be attached to various interfaces (e.g., parallel interface 462, serial interface 464, keyboard interface 468, and mouse interface 470 coupled to ISA bus 440. Alternatively, many I/O devices can be accommodated by a super I/O controller (not shown) attached to ISA bus 440.
In order to attach computer system 401 to another computer system to copy files over a network, LAN card 430 is coupled to PCI bus 410. Similarly, to connect computer system 401 to an ISP to connect to the Internet using a telephone line connection, modem 475 is connected to serial port 464 and PCI-to-ISA Bridge 435.
While the computer system described in
One of the preferred implementations of the invention is a client application, namely, a set of instructions (program code) or other functional descriptive material in a code module that may, for example, be resident in the random access memory of the computer. Until required by the computer, the set of instructions may be stored in another computer memory, for example, in a hard disk drive, or in a removable memory such as an optical disk (for eventual use in a CD ROM) or floppy disk (for eventual use in a floppy disk drive), or downloaded via the Internet or other computer network. Thus, the present invention may be implemented as a computer program product for use in a computer. In addition, although the various methods described are conveniently implemented in a general purpose computer selectively activated or reconfigured by software, one of ordinary skill in the art would also recognize that such methods may be carried out in hardware, in firmware, or in more specialized apparatus constructed to perform the required method steps. Functional descriptive material is information that imparts functionality to a machine. Functional descriptive material includes, but is not limited to, computer programs, instructions, rules, facts, definitions of computable functions, objects, and data structures.
While particular embodiments of the present invention have been shown and described, it will be obvious to those skilled in the art that, based upon the teachings herein, changes and modifications may be made without departing from this invention and its broader aspects. Therefore, the appended claims are to encompass within their scope all such changes and modifications as are within the true spirit and scope of this invention. Furthermore, it is to be understood that the invention is solely defined by the appended claims. It will be understood by those with skill in the art that if a specific number of an introduced claim element is intended, such intent will be explicitly recited in the claim, and in the absence of such recitation no such limitation is present. For non-limiting example, as an aid to understanding, the following appended claims contain usage of the introductory phrases “at least one” and “one or more” to introduce claim elements. However, the use of such phrases should not be construed to imply that the introduction of a claim element by the indefinite articles “a” or “an” limits any particular claim containing such introduced claim element to inventions containing only one such element, even when the same claim includes the introductory phrases “one or more” or “at least one” and indefinite articles such as “a” or “an;” the same holds true for the use in the claims of definite articles.
