HTML Executable lets you generate stand-alone Windows programs: your website is packed into a single .EXE file, ready to be shared with others. Moreover, this .EXE file does not require any third-party software (no Microsoft .net framework nor DLL files).

This feature has a price: the code necessary to run stand-alone EXE files takes about 5 Mb uncompressed. This is relatively small compared to the size of other web browser distributions. Anyway, this is still large for online distribution.

This is the main reason why you have two possibilities:

• creating stand-alone EXE files. If size does not matter for you, you should stay with this option. Moreover, you can compress the EXE file to make it smaller for distribution: see below.
   
• creating EXE files that are smaller but have a dependency: they require a runtime module in order to work. For that case, we compiled the code necessary for Windows to run the EXE in a single public DLL file called the runtime module. This module is a dynamic-link library that allows publications made with HTML Executable to be run: it works like Visual Basic DLL runtimes, Adobe Flash player, Microsoft SilverLight, Java Runtime Environment, Windows Installer runtime, etc... When you start a publication EXE file, the latter will look for the runtime module and call it in order to run the publication.

Not merging the runtime module results in smaller EXE files (in this case, the code added to the .EXE file takes about 100 kb only!). You can distribute the runtime module along with your publication files. Setup programs for runtime modules are available for public download and distribution.

If the runtime module is not found on the user's computer, the publication will show a message box with instructions (that you can modify of course) about how to get and install the runtime module.

Compressing Stand-alone Executable files to make them smaller

If you plan to distribute your publication .EXE file on the Internet, we recommend you to compress it in order to reduce its size and download time. Several ways are possible:

compress the final .EXE file with UPX: UPX is a free executable packer available at http://upx.sourceforge.net/ HTML Executable can call UPX itself if you enable the option.

distribute the final .EXE file in a Setup program: you can use Paquet Builder to compress your .EXE file into a Setup program, optimized for online distribution.

See Distributing Publications.

protect your EXE file with a third-party EXE compressor or protector: stand-alone executable files made with HTML Executable can be secured with third-party software protection systems.