Throughout this book you've learned that Scriptlets are made up of Dynamic HTML code, that they are nothing more than Web pages with a particular structure, that follow a special naming convention, and so forth. In short, what prevails is an outlook where Scriptlets are pages rather than anything else. Even if many programmers—probably even many of you—are developing Internet-oriented applications, very few have ever faced the problem of automatically packaging Web-based modules. Believe it or not, with Scriptlets this becomes a central issue. While specialized tools exist to arrange setup applications practically automatically for Windows programs, the same kind of support is missing for anything that relates to HTML. When it comes to HTML, in fact, it seems that packaging isn't a problem—or rather, it is not a primary problem.
At most, we could accept this approach for standard HTML applications, but not for Scriptlets. Scriptlets are special HTML documents. They have been introduced and thought to be reusable and redistributable. This automatically assigns the problem of packaging components an important and fundamental role. Scriptlets exist to be deployed, once you have finished writing and testing them. Furthermore, since Scriptlets are single and separate components you cannot think of installing them manually for each customer that buys them. (Sometimes, however, this might be reasonable for complete and totally customized applications.)
From this we can see that we definitely need a tool that can help us to arrange setup programs to install Scriptlets. At the moment, this is one of major shortcomings of Scriptlets. Microsoft hasn't provided anything of the kind yet.
In this chapter, we will be discussing in more detail why we need such a tool and how to build it in Visual Basic. Doing so will give us a good opportunity to talk about:
By reading this chapter, you will gain a deeper knowledge of the Dynamic HTML object model and a tool that could help you to automatically gather every file you need for distributing your Scriptlets and getting them to work perfectly.