JPz'log Coin Coin and Plop da Plop

IzPack Google Summer of Code proposals

We are planning to apply as a mentoring organization. Who knows, Google may select us with a bit of luck

The projects proposals can be consulted and added from http://www.izforge.com/izpack/wiki/gsoc2007

SOAP-DTC 0.1.0 released!

I am pleased to announce the first release of the SOAP-DTC project!

SOAP-DTC is a simple and minimalist set of SOAP 1.2 libraries for Java. It is aimed at projects that both require a loose-dynamic binding to SOAP-based web services and that prefer working with SOAP messages as XML document. This is done by using the flexible Dom4J library combined with Jaxen for XPath, and the XPP3 XML pull-parser for efficiency.

SOAP-DTC is released under a liberal MIT-style license. At the moment, SOAP-DTC provides one core library for exchanging SOAP 1.2 messages with web services endpoints, and one library for delivering SOAP-based web services through a Java servlet.

You can take a look at the libraries features by reading the tutorials:

• core library tutorial
• server library tutorial

Enjoy

IzPack native launcher 2.2 released

The IzPack Java installer native launcher is available for download. Released under the terms of a MIT-style liberal license, it allows to launch a Java installer from an operating system native executable application. It will also perform preliminary checkings to ensure that a proper Java Runtime Environment is present on the system. If not, the end-user will be helped in either downloading one or installing one which is bundled with the installer.

This new release does not bring any new feature or fix. The only reason for this release it to ship a Win32 executable which is completely standalone. In the past, a MinGW DLL was required to properly work on the Win32 platform. The launcher is based on Qt 4 from Trolltech, and can be recompiled for Linux, BSD and Mac OS X.

Compelling alternatives are provided by other projects:

• Launch4J
• JSmooth

Hence, it is up to you to decide which one is best for you

Qt static linking and removing the mingw dll dependency

For the development of the IzPack Java installer native launcher, I have been facing a tricky issue regarding the compilation. Indeed, I wanted to get a single executable with no dll dependencies, but somehow never managed to get rid of the one on a MingW dll. I finally found a solution somewhere on the net

1. You will need to recompile Qt, so run configure with the -static option. You should also remove the support for rtti and C++ exceptions. You can also gain some space by removing the themes but the windows and windowsxp ones.
2. ... but before you compile anything, edit mkspecs/win32-g++/qmake.conf and remove the -mthreads. This is actually why you get this stupid MingW dependency. Please note that the build may break if you still have the rtti and C++ exceptions support built-in.
3. Run make sub-src and go drink a few coffees.
4. You can go back to your Qt application, run qmake then make. Make sure you had static in your QMake file configuration.
5. The executable can be large (about 5MB), so do not hesitate to run UPX on it.

With my trimmed-down Qt build, I am getting a UPX-compressed standalone executable of 1,94MB.