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18Feb/092

IzPack 4.2.1 released + launching professional services for IzPack

(repost from the official announcement)

IzPack

On behalf of the IzPack project team, I am glad to announce the release of IzPack 4.2.1!

IzPack is a one-stop solution for packaging, distributing and deploying applications. IzPack is a project hosted by the Codehaus foundation (see http://codehaus.org/) and it can be downloaded from http://izpack.org/

IzPack 4.2.1 is a maintenance, stable release that brings a lot of useful fixes and improvements for production use while the team continues to develop new features for IzPack 4.3.0. Some notable changes include:

  • privileges escalation mechanism can now be fine-tuned to be activated on selected platforms (e.g., activate it on MS Windows Vista, but not on MS Windows XP, Linux and Mac OS X)
  • standalone compiler fixes
  • easier development of IzPack panels with Maven
  • bug fixes in automated and web installers
  • conditions / rules framework fixes
  • loose packs fixes
  • fixes for the shortcuts creation on MS Windows Vista
  • translations updates.

The complete release notes are available from our JIRA issue tracker.

I would like to warmly thanks the IzPack developers and contributors for their incredible help and hard work that made this release possible. Thanks a lot guys, you rock :-)

audio-input-microphone I would also like to announce that I am starting to offer professional services for IzPack in the form of freelance consulting, support, custom development and installer creation bootstrapping.

I have just set up a page at http://izpack.proservices.ponge.info/ (more details will be available soon). Do not hesitate to contact me if such services would be useful to you!

The launch of such professional services does not mean that IzPack is going to be a proprietary commercial product at all (and that would be silly, really). I do care about IzPack being still that fruitful ecosystem where businesses, individuals and projects collaborate to offer a compelling solution to applications deployment. In the end of the day, this activity can only help sustaining the project.

IzPack is and will always be a free, opensource and community-driven project. That's my promise!

Thanks again to you all for your support, and enjoy this new release!

Filed under: English, IzPack, Java 2 Comments
11Feb/099

New IzPack-based installers for GlassFish

IzPack. Package once. Deploy everywhere.
GlassFish Application Server

I am glad to announce the availability of the new IzPack-based installers for GlassFish. Those installers are an independent repackaging based on the official binaries from Sun Microsystems and the GlassFish community.

The installers can be downloaded from Codehaus:

Both installers are based on the preview of the upcoming IzPack 4.2.1 release. A nice improvement over the past is that those installers will make a privileges elevation on Windows Vista and 7 without the need for manually launching them as an administrator or wrapping / launching them from a Windows executable. To put it in another words, the very single JAR that you can download is able to run itself as a different user on those platforms, automatically.

The Prelude installer bootstraps the Update Center tool that is now becoming a cornerstone for handling the updates and 3rd-party modules installation in GlassFish. Deeper integration between IzPack and IPS/UC is part of the future plans: some students that I supervise I working on such a project.

The best use-case for them is probably in the context of developer environments, as it brings some user-friendly-ness in the initial installation of the application server. However you may also use it in a production server context if you like!

I hope that those installers will help the GlassFish community :-)

Please let me know if you run into any issue.

Filed under: English, IzPack, Java 9 Comments
6Feb/091

Creating namespaces with functions in JavaScript

JavaScript does not have either proper packages nor namespaces support. This can lead to the usual naming conflicts when one mixes JavaScript "libraries" from multiple sources.

I recently had a look at the source code of jQuery and was intrigued by the very first lines of code where an anonymous function is being called and wraps the remainder of the code...

This is how I figured out how people could make namespaces in JavaScript as well as properly hide some attributes and functions from the outside work (recall that JavaScript does not have a notion of private/protected/public visibility).

If you are a seasoned JavaScript developer then please forgive me for not having figured out earlier ;-)

The idea is pretty simple: your namespace is a JavaScript object that is created by a function that you call straight along with its definition. In turn, this function returns an object that only contains the "public" attributes and methods that you want to expose. The rest is automatically "private" inside the function.

Testing this is rather easy:

Once again this is neither new nor much difficult to understand, but at least I hope that you will have learned a trick :-)

Filed under: English, Geeking, Howto 1 Comment
6Feb/090

IzPack team on expansion!

(this is a repost of the announcement from the IzPack news)

The IzPack project is glad to welcome 3 new developers:

  • Anthonin Bonnefoy
  • Florian Bühlmann
  • David Duponchel

Florian recently contributed a lot of high quality patches as an external contributor, and it just made a whole lot of sense to have in joining the project.

Anthonin and David are final year students in a french computer engineering school called ISIMA. They worked under my supervision on some IzPack refactorings. They made a fantastic work and expressed their whish to join the project beyond the scope of their project.

Overall that is great news for IzPack, and I am sure that those guys will significantly help pushing the project higher :-)

Filed under: English, IzPack No Comments
   

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