Chapter 17. Deploying Applications

Embedded applications aren't installed like traditional applications. Nonetheless, code is installed on the target, and time needs to be allotted for the process of getting the program on the target in such a way that it's ready to run when the board starts. This is a nontrivial undertaking. During the design process, how the device will be built, where, and in what quantities affects what effort goes into automating the deployment process.

Deploying an application on an embedded device is very different from the task of deploying an application on a regular desktop system, because this process is additive in nature: the system is already running, so the task of deploying means putting the application in the appropriate place and updating any configuration files. On a desktop system, the program being deployed is one of several applications running on the device, and you may not know what else is running on the target machine along with your application. For an embedded system, however, deploying the software means creating everything that is necessary to execute the application and having that ready to be burned on the device during manufacturing. As an embedded engineer, you have a lot of control over what applications appear on the device and how they're initially configured; this relieves you from some of the problems that an engineer working on a traditional project needs to solve, but it introduces some new issues that you need to address.