SoftwareValet is a software installer for BeOS

BeOS

BeOS is an operating system for personal computers which began development by Be Inc. in 1991. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was optimized for digital media work and was written to take advantage of modern hardware facilities such as symmetric multiprocessing by utilizing...

, originally developed by Starcode Software. It has been included with BeOS

BeOS

BeOS is an operating system for personal computers which began development by Be Inc. in 1991. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was optimized for digital media work and was written to take advantage of modern hardware facilities such as symmetric multiprocessing by utilizing...

 since 1998, when Be Inc.

Be Inc.

Be Incorporated was an American computer company founded in 1990, best known for the Be Operating System and BeBox personal computer. Be was founded by former Apple Computer executive Jean-Louis Gassée with capital from Seymour Cray....

 purchased Starcode's assets.

It was originally developed for web deployment of applications, where a user would click on an 'Install with SoftwareValet' link on a website, and the BeOS web browser at the time, NetPositive

NetPositive

NetPositive is the default browser that comes with the Be Operating System . It has partial support for JavaScript, but no Java or CSS support. NetPositive originally was the only web browser available for BeOS, but that is no longer the case. The last official version of NetPositive before the...

, would launch SoftwareValet. It also handled product registration and software updates through a (now defunct) centralised server, BeDepot (bedepot.com).

SoftwareValet applications could also be distributed in non-web delivered upkg files, which are non-self executing, encapsulated installer files. Installation is based on direct file locations and shell scripts, and has very little chance of user manipulation; although a file format

File format

A file format is a particular way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file.Since a disk drive, or indeed any computer storage, can store only bits, the computer must have some way of converting information to 0s and 1s and vice-versa. There are different kinds of formats for...

 break in BeOS R4.5 allowed package makers to use non-direct paths, as a preparation for making the OS multi-user.

The compression format is known to be based on zlib

Zlib

zlib is a software library used for data compression. zlib was written by Jean-Loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compression program. Zlib is also a crucial component of many software platforms including Linux, Mac OS X,...

, but no tools other than SoftwareValet exist for manipulating packages.

A companion application, PackageBuilder was bundled with the BeOS developer tools, and was used for creating packages, or editing existing ones.