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IzPack and Java Web Start

Many people have been offering their IzPack-based installers through Java Web Start (one well-know example is JBoss AS). This can be handy at times: you just click on a link/button on a webpage then Java Web Start downloads the installer and runs it for you. No need to download, double-click on the JAR, etc.

Offering an installer through Java Web Start is not very complicated, yet you may not be familiar with how it works. Especially, you may not know how to create that JNLP file that makes it all possible.

I have created a tool, now in the project Subversion trunk, that I called izpack2jnlp. It is written in Python. All you need to do is to pass it a bunch of arguments and it will create the JNLP file for you.

Once this is done, you only have to sign your installer JAR file then upload the files (installer JAR + JNLP file) to the right place so that the URLs match the codebase argument that you gave to izpack2jnlp.

You can already grab and test this tool from:

• http://svn.izpack.codehaus.org/browse/izpack/izpack-utils/trunk/izpack2jnlp
• http://github.com/jponge/izpack-utils/tree/master

Do not hesitate to propose enhancements

Related posts:

1. IzPack Git repositories on GitHub
2. IzPack 4.1.1 released
3. IzPack supports pack200
4. IzPack article in Java Magazin
5. IzPack and the Nimbus look and feel