How to create portable application

Portable application runs just as any regular application, such as your word processor, except that portable application does not require installation or depend on any external resources to maintain the original application's functionality. To make a portable application is a perfect way to add flexibility, mobility and transparency to your software. Here you will learn how to create a portable application yourself, and which tools can help you do that.

Idea

The idea behind making portable applications is pretty much straight-forward: to grab the original application along with its external resources, such as libraries, data, other auxiliary files, and pack (or "bundle") all that into a single executable file. Let's take a look at the tool that would help us do the job.

Tool

The tool has a self-descriptive name, BoxedApp Packer. BoxedApp Packer helps to make portable applications from the regular ones. It compresses the source application along with its dependencies and working files into a single self-contained executable file, which you can instantly run and use. In other words, with BoxedApp Packer you can squeeze all of your original application's ActiveX controls, DLLs, and all other files into a single binary and then run it just as you would run a completely regular application installed a completely regular way. That's right, the portable binary compiled by BoxedApp Packer is fully autonomous and doesn't require any external resources or installation.

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Benefits

Packed into a single binary, your application is ultra-mobile. You can launch it instantly from a network location or from a removable disk. Portable applications fully maintain the original applications' functionality and can utilize the whole power of the computer. At the same time, they do not require special security privileges and do not affect shared resources, such as disk space or registry, as the applications' embedded objects are extracted directly into memory. Portable applications utilize virtual registry and space.

Customization

You can further expand the functionality of your portable application by adding custom plugins to it; plugins can take advantage of the special API, BoxedApp SDK API, which allows to create virtual files "on the fly", utilize virtual registry, and do many other things.

Freedom

When your portable application starts, it can also load necessary DLL through the Internet or over LAN and then use them just as if they were available on the local hard drive.

With BoxedApp Packer, you can make portable applications with ease and charge them with unprecedented power.

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