Distributing Software

A Simple Way to Ship

I’ve spent a lot of time in my life writing software. I’ve written a lot that is good and distributed, but I’ve written even more software that will likely never be distributed, and really, as software goes, systems change over time and even good software gets overwritten, deprecated or goes virtually unused.

For a lot of projects, the difficulty in distribution is figuring out how to get it in front of users. Well-enough tenured craftfolks have their deployment style of choice — VPS, app store, static site engine — but here’s a most simple way to get software to modern users that just crossed my mind.

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Software distribution, fundamentally, is providing functionality. That’s it. Every computer owner has access to an internet browser which is a robust graphics engine for displaying a user interface for functionality. If the functionality being distributed can be as simple as HTML scripts, you can simply send over HTML scripts, and have them open the software in a browser.

Here’s the gist: (github gist) (Try it now)

Download ZIP, and open index.html in your web browser.

You’re welcome! Happy Programming, and keep it simple.