Google Sites is a great way to easily and quickly publish content to net for your users to download. For my Masters thesis, I am developing a mobile application that is currently being targeted at the windows mobile platform. As much as I dislike many aspects of this platform (see my other posts). I really like how easy it is to deploy your application using the built in tools. Microsoft has fantastic documentation for deploying your windows mobile application using the built in tools, however that is only half the battle. Unless you want to send this file via email to all your users, they need a way to download it fom the web.
I tried getting the cab file up there in a few ways. My application is written in Ruby on Rails and I am using a newly popularized rails server stack that sits on nginx. Problem was the documentation for nginx isn't stellar for anything other than serving rails or django. I had trouble configuring the mime types to server up the cab files consistently. Cab files are really just a different form of compression like .rar or .zip but it wasn't recognizing it the way I wanted to.
Then it hit me! Use Google Sites!
That's exactly what I did. I posted the file that way and directed my users to that link on their mobile browsers. Once they click it the file downloads and installs from there. Google Sites also tracks versions of the same file which for me was perfect since the application is changing on a weekly basis. I've been using it on the past couple of builds and it's been great! Thank you Google for another fantastic service.
Kent
No comments:
Post a Comment