Announcing an IzPack-based GlassFish installer
Posted by: Julien in English, IzPack, Java
The big surprise is here!
I am pleased to announce the imminent release of a cross-platform installer for the GlassFish project. Of course it is based on IzPack 
It looks that some people recently complained about the existing GlassFish installer (see this and this). I must admit that the current process can be improved, especially getting rid of the Java VM flag that you need to add, selecting where you want to install GlassFish and finally running the Ant setup script. The process is not that bad, but it can be streamlined a little bit.
The idea of preparing an IzPack-based installer started from my personal use of GlassFish. I took the firm decision to investigate what could be done when I met with Alexis last month. We discussed the idea and he convinced me to try to do it, and eventually contribute it back to the GlassFish community. I don’t see this installer competing with the current one. I rather see it as an alternative that people may enjoy better… or absolutely not and that’s just fine with me 
The installer will be able to install to Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the same JAR file. It will install GlassFish on your system and automatically run the Ant setup script. Finally, an uninstaller will be provided.
The installer is now ready to be published… I am just waiting for GlassFish v2 UR1 to be released. I will then release my own IzPack-based installer within the 24h-48h following the official GlassFish v2 UR1 release. I will also provide the source code of the scripts and IzPack-specific files needed to generate the installer under a liberal MIT-style license.
Meanwhile you can have a look at the following screenshots from the installer running on Mac OS X:
The whole IzPack community will also benefit from this showcase as a quite a bunch of my recent SVN commits are directly related to the creation of this installer. Indeed, a few bugs have been fixed, some parts of the GUI have been slightly improved and some features have been added (like the light JDK/JRE check).
Stay tuned for the release!
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This is great. Thank you so much for your effort and wonderful work. I was surprised to see this before an openinstaller based installer since that is a glassfish subproject. I’ve always loved izPack.
Will this be able to support cluster / developer profiles? (ie. setup.xml vs setup-cluster.xml)
Thanks a bunch =]
Andrew
Announcing an IzPack-based GlassFish installer…
[...]I am pleased to announce the imminent release of a cross-platform installer for the GlassFish project based on IzPack. The installer will be able to install to Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the same JAR file.[...]…
Thanks Andrew
The current installer invokes setup.xml, but we can envision calling setup-cluster.xml instead. Anyway you can start with the developer profile in your domain then upgrade it to a cluster configuration.
[...] like our problems with GlassFish have just began. Whereas the installation issues found a quick solution, we almost immediately ran into a year old problem, reported by the guys from YourKit. The issue is [...]
Just a suggestion / thought for the installer. How hard would it be to have it add init scripts and window services?
Is this something that I could do myself modifying the installer?
I was thinking of using the info from this article (unless there’s a newer / better way) for the windows service:
http://www.ryandelaplante.com/rdelaplante/entry/creating_a_windows_service_for
Andrew
@Andrew: this can be done. I deliberately chose to make the GlassFish installer “pure java”, but IzPack can also talk to Windows specificities like registries. I believe someone already wrote about Windows services on the wiki at http://izpack.org/wiki/start
hello..
thanks
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Is the source for install.xml file for glassfish installer available? We currently use Inno Setup but trying to move to pure java based solution. IZPack makes lot of sense but we need to make some quick progress to prove that this can be viable option.
-Jagadeesh
Zephyr, Now Test Management is a breeze.
Sure, just go to http://izpack.org/showcase-glassfish-v2/ and clone the Mercurial repository.