In the previous chapters, we learnt the basic aspects of Irrlicht, how to use scene nodes, meshes and shaders. In this appendix, we will take a look at how to deploy your own Irrlicht application, in case you want to distribute your application to family, friends or even customers.
In this appendix, we will:
Learn the dos and don'ts for cross-platform deployment
Learn how to deploy the source code
So let's get on with it...
Software deployment is a general process that can consist of different things depending on the application we would want to deploy. For example, deploying a web application is completely different from deploying a mobile application to Android, Apple mobile devices, or Irrlicht applications. Basically, what we mean by software deployment is that making our application available to be used by the actual end users. We build, compile the project in release mode, removing all the debug symbols, go through several test cases, and make the program more efficient. Deployment could be a better term for web applications where the server side scripts are physically moved from a development/production environment to a live server environment where the users would go and access the applications. But in terms of desktop applications, Irrlicht applications in particular, what we are more interested in is creating a package of our application with all the necessary files and resources so that it can be easily distributed and extracted, installed or deployed and used on another PC that may not have the same configurations we use. So let's take a look how to create such as package for different target platforms.