Runaware competitors?
Runaware allows users to demo desktop software via java applets or activex controls in a browser.
Anyone know of any other competitors in this space? I've been asked to look into a way to do this...
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consultutah - please post any answers you find back on this question; I think this is quite a common need for demoing non-web apps in a web-oriented world. Thx. – Steve Wilkinson 15 years ago
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Steve, I never found anything suitable. Opportunity? – Consult Utah 15 years ago
2 Answers
VMWare has VMPlayer, which is kind of similar. You can package up your app with a whole OS, and let people try it. Without the having to install the application (just VMPlayer).
Not quite the same, but for some cases it works pretty well.
If your application is written with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), then you can easily have a version with limited functionality done with Silverlight.
If you have it written in Swing (Java GUI) then having it work as an applet is easy.
I have seen various companies allow you to see a demo of their software, or play with a part of it, mainly a very limited subset, at times.
I don't know what you mean by competitors in this space, unless you are looking for companies that allow other companies to do this, then your competitors would be Oracle (Sun) and MS, as they make it easy to allow people to test.
There are other frameworks that easily switch from a web demo to an installed application.
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I am looking to direct competitors to Runaware's TestDrive app. They host your app virtualized through citrix plugins. It works ok, but perf isn't what I'd hope.. – Consult Utah 15 years ago
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I think your toughest competitor will be that a well-designed program can do this easily, rather than paying for something. What is your target market? – James Black 15 years ago
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James - based on recent practical experience, I would take issue with the statement about Silverlight and WPF - it really depends what your app does, as there are tons of things in the .NET framework that aren't supported in Silverlight (yet). You may be lucky and none of those features are important to your app, but for some apps, you either need a re-write to get key functionality working, or in fact you can't get stuff working at all. I guess that equates to "limited functionality", but it's possible it's key functionality that your app depends on, making a Silverlight demo useless. – Steve Wilkinson 15 years ago
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@Steve Wilkinson - The key is a limited functionality demo, you can determine what is needed. For example, rather than having it go to a real database, it can use an xml file. If there are graphics needs that Silverlight can't do, then don't have the graphics be as good as it would be. The idea is that it isn't too much work to separate out the various components, to give options on switching from one display option to another. – James Black 15 years ago
