Well, it is really difficult to describe in a few words what this project is for us, because since from the first moment has begun to be part of our own life...  Briefly we can say that winPenPack is an Italian open source project that deals with portable software, both natively portable and portabilized by means of X-Launcher, our portable program launcher. These apps can be grouped into suites or can be used also as standalone portable programs, adapting with end users preferences.

winPenPack philosophy is well summarized by our (very restrictive) definition of "portable software": a portable program can't simply be a "no-install" program, but must also be able to save its settings into his own folder (or a user-definable folder), does not write settings or leave other data in user folders (i.e. into c:\Users\TheUserName\AppData\Roaming\ or c:\Documents and Settings\TheUserName) or into the registry, must be able to run from a USB pen drive and can perform path normalizations moving around different PCs (where the pen drive could be installed with different drive letters). Obviously, all of these programs can be executed also from hard drives, greatly simplifying recovery operations of all programs (and their preferred configurations) when reinstalling the operating system.

Our project started in November 2005 by a brilliant intuition of Danilo Leggieri (AKA Danix, the founder of the project). Danilo and a couple of "web friends" expanded the project and the community grew very quickly. Since that date, we have issued about 20 new releases and hundreds of Open Source portable applications. Actually, the project is well known in Italy and is growing also abroad. winPenPack is hosted on SourceForge and all the collections are regularly distributed also in bundles with some IT magazines. The community of users has grown over the years and has actively contributed to the growth of the whole project. The site currently hosts various projects created and suggested also by forum members, and is also used for bug reporting and users suggestions.

Currently, the project involves 6 officially active people and a lot of contributors (translators, testers, and so on). All of them are spending their time completely for free, working on the project out of pure passion. Each member of the staff has a different job in "normal life", not necessarily connected to the world of computer and information technology.

How do you make a winPenPack application?  What kinds of things do you need to do to make a desktop application portable? ¶

The core of all our portabilizations is X-Launcher, the winPenPack program launcher. A program portabilized by X-Launcher is called an "X-Program". The folder structure of any X-Program always contains a \Bin folder (the program folder) and a \User folder (the settings folder), plus other optional folders, such as \Documents or \Downloads (depending on the nature of the portabilized program). At the root of this structure there is X-ProgramName.exe (the launcher of "ProgramName" program) and X-ProgramName.ini (the text file that contains all the settings and instructions for X-ProgramName.exe to make portable the portabilized program). Due to its nature, the .ini file can be easily edited with any text editor, simplifying the creation, the testing and the fine-tuning of the portabilization. The various sections of the X-ProgramName.ini file allow us to define the X-Launcher behavior towards the registry or the user folders or to perform other actions. We can easily copy or move registry keys or files or folders back and forth beween the USB pen drive and the PC hard drive,  leaving the host PC in the exactly same state it was before we executed it on our X-Program.  So X-Launcher allows us to recreate the environment in which a program works correctly (registry keys, user folders, etc.), but, after the program execution completes, it leaves the PC "clean", because when closing the program all these keys (or files) are moved back into the \User folder of the portabilized program folders structure, ready to recreate the environment at the next execution.

The process of portabilization of a program passes through various steps. First of all, someone (a team member or a forum user) signals an interesting program. We test its portability through RegShot, which helps us understand if the program uses the registry or the user folders for saving its settings or for other purposes.  If, after our tests, the program turns out to be natively 100% portable, it is added to the "Portable Software" section of our Download area. If the program is not fully portable, we check whether it is possible to make it portable through X-Launcher. This phase reuses all the information gathered during portability tests to determine which features of X-Launcher should be enabled to portabilize the program.  This is the most important step, that requires all the portabilization skills of our developers, and often makes the difference between being able to consider a program portabilizable or not. The last step is the packaging of the X-Program and its distribution through our "X-Software" Download area. Sometimes even 100% portable programs can receive some benefit from X-Launcher (for example, backups of configurations, paths normalization, use in conjunction with external libraries like Java), so we create also X-Programs of that kind.

Did you run into any special challenges when making the portable version of Apache OpenOffice (X-ApacheOpenOffice)?  Are there any changes we could make in the OpenOffice to make portable versions more powerful? ¶

For developing X-ApacheOpenOffice Portable we were able to put into practice our previous knowledge acquired in past years with early versions of OpenOffice. This background helped us a lot for speeding up the development of X-AOO Portable.

The more relevant features added to Apache OpenOffice for building the completely portable X-ApacheOpenOffice Portable are:

1. Path normalization: all paths of recent files that are saved into X-AOO Portable folder structure have been normalized
2. "System" folders: the \Documents and \Backups X-ApacheOpenOffice Portable subfolders have been set as "system" folders, also moving the main folder
3. Disabled quickstart.exe: quickstart.exe has been disabled to prevent the soffice.exe process from remaining active in the traybar after closing the program, or when the user tries to disconnect the USB pen drive from the PC
4. JavaGet integration: the integration of JavaGet functions into the launcher allows X-AOO to work with or without a Java installation present on the host PC

We haven't had particular challenges to develop our portable version (just some extra-time due to the download of all language versions to be merged into one single X-Program). However, the fact that Apache OpenOffice recognizes automatically the OS language has simplified our work, allowing us to have a single launcher. For the future we would like very much also a monolithic multi-language setup of Apache OpenOffice to be used as a base for our portable X-ApacheOpenOffice Portable.

When I think of portable applications I think mainly of putting apps on USB keys.  But are you seeing any other interesting uses, like people running their apps from the cloud, DropBox, etc.?¶

Portable programs aren't simply "apps to be run from USB keys". Portable programs allow the users to carry in their pockets all their preferred applications, with all their preferred settings, to be run anywhere they find a Windows PC with a free USB port. That's it. We could even say that the portable programs were the forerunners of the cloud: your programs, everywhere...  At this moment, we see cloud apps more oriented to mobile devices (that are "portable" by definition). Windows programs need an operating system in which to be executed. If we would be able to run Windows portable programs from the cloud, the only thing that we would do without would be exactly our USB pen drive... 

Where can readers go to learn more about winPenPack or to help with the project? ¶