Introduction

Incorporating files in a binary program can sometimes be a challenge. The Advance Resource Embedder is a flexible tool that collects files such as documentation, images, scripts, configuration files and generates a source code that contains these files. It is able to apply some transformations on the collected files:

  • it can run a Javascript minifier such as closure,
  • it can compress CSS files by running yui-compressor,
  • it can compress files by running gzip or another compression tool.

Once these transformations are executed, it invokes a target generator to produce a source file either in C, Ada or Go language. The generated source file can then be used in the final program and taken into account during the compilation process of that program. At the end, the binary will contain the embedded files with their optional transformations.

Resource Embedder Overview

The process to use ARE is simple:

  • You describe the resources that you want to embed. The description is either made on command line arguments or by writing an XML file. The XML description gives more flexibility as it allows to define a transformation rule that must be executed on the original file before being embedded. This allows to minify a Javascript or CSS file, compress some files and even encrypt a file before its integration.
  • You run the ARE command with your target language and rule description and you give the tool a list of directories that must be scanned to identify the files that must be collected. The ARE tool scan the directories according to the patterns that you have given either on the command line or in the XML rule description. After identifying the files, the tool applies the rules and execute the transformations. The ARE tool then invokes the target language generator that writes one or several files depending on the list of resources.
  • Once the files are generated, you use them in your program and add them in your build process as they are now part of your sources. After building your program, it now embeds the resource files that were collected and optionally transformed.

This document describes how to build the tool and how you can use the different features to embed files in a binary program witten in Ada, C/C++ or Go.