JavaFX In Action #14 with Mike Hearn about Conveyor to build self-updating desktop app packages in minutes
Mike Hearn solves a problem that a lot of developers are struggling with: how to easily distribute your application and make sure the users get the latest version. With Conveyor he created a tool to do that easily with JavaFX, Electron, and Flutter apps!
About Mike
Mike Hearn was previously a senior software engineer and tech lead at Google, where he worked for around eight years on Maps/Earth, Gmail anti spam, signup abuse and login security. In 2014 he left Google to focus on Bitcoin development full time. After two years of doing that, he joined R3 as the lead platform engineer, where he led development of the Corda project. He currently leads Hydraulic Software, a developer tools company, and works for Oracle Labs.
You can find him on LinkedIn, his blog and Medium.
About Conveyor
Conveyor makes distributing desktop apps as easy as shipping a web app. It’s a tool, not a service, that generates and signs self-upgrading packages for Windows, macOS, and Linux using each platform’s native package formats without requiring you to have those operating systems.
It’s free for open-source apps and has simple per-project pricing for commercial apps.
Check the website and documentation for more info.
Video content
00:00 Who is Mike?
00:40 What is Conveyor?
01:08 Comparing Conveyor and jDeploy
02:37 Signing your applications
03:34 Demo of Conveyor
06:22 How Conveyor builds for all platforms
06:48 Free versus paid Conveyor
10:38 Keeping your app updated to the latest version (comparing to jpackage)
13:48 JFX Central is distributed with Conveyor
14:33 How to prepare a Java app for Conveyor
15:51 No native compilation needed (GraalVM)
18:33 Plans for the future
22:42 Check the site and examples to learn more!