JPz’log

Good news: IzPack 4.1.0 has just been released!

Here is a reproduction of the official announcement.

I am pleased to announce that the IzPack team released today the version 4.1.0 of the software.

IzPack is a one-stop solution for packaging, distributing and deploying applications. It is fully cross-platform and generates a single installer. As such, it is an alternative to native solutions such as platform-specific installers and package managers. IzPack-generated installers only require a Java virtual machine to run.

This new version brings new features such as Pack200 compression support or better user-defined conditions. Improvements include a reduction of the installers size, the ability to set environment variables in ProcessPanel or variables substitution in HtmlInfoPanel. Finally, this release brings its usual set of bug fixes and minor improvements.

It is recommended that current users upgrade to this new release.

IzPack can be downloaded from http://izpack.org/downloads/ and is released under the permissive Apache License v2.0.

Many thanks go to the developers and contributors for their hard work!

Please find the release notes below. Feel free to repost this announcement to your favorite blogs and websites!

Release notes:

Bug

* [IZPACK-72] - PortProcessor does not catch invalid error
* [IZPACK-93] - Re-enabled button does not gain focus
* [IZPACK-126] - Lost input data when navigating forward/backward in installer
* [IZPACK-127] - Conditionid used instead of condition for job definitions
* [IZPACK-141] - Information defined in info section are not available as build-in variable during compile time
* [IZPACK-142] - Custom panel jars are not found with maven plugin
* [IZPACK-151] - file unpack does not work with war files
* [IZPACK-152] - UserPathPanel prints debug messages to console
* [IZPACK-159] - IzPack2App: executable bit should be forced to be set on the Java application stub
* [IZPACK-160] - Documention for file’s override attribute missing “false” value
* [IZPACK-167] - izpack2exe crashes when called from a different directory than where it resides
* [IZPACK-168] - izpack2app does not properly work when called from the same folder as the script

Improvement

* [IZPACK-63] - Reduce the installers size
* [IZPACK-112] - Registry interaction: allow string key values to be extended
* [IZPACK-114] - Ability to set environment variables when using ProcessPanel
* [IZPACK-123] - Multiple HTMLInfo Panels showing different html files…
* [IZPACK-124] - Parsing/Variable substitution of the content in HTMLInfoPanel
* [IZPACK-130] - TestLangPacks: build.xml update: Added distribution dir and files and some other tasks. Added zip creation.
* [IZPACK-149] - support encoding when interpolating izpack descriptor
* [IZPACK-155] - InstallPanel overall progress bar should be indeterminate if there is only one pack to install
* [IZPACK-157] - Raise the JVM heap size in IzPack scripts

New Feature

* [IZPACK-82] - Pack200 support
* [IZPACK-84] - Install Script Locator Framework
* [IZPACK-110] - User Condition
* [IZPACK-145] - Ablility to disable the attaching of the artifact in maven plugin
* [IZPACK-147] - ability to customize the final name

Task

* [IZPACK-129] - TestLangPacks: Added directory for distribution files.
* [IZPACK-131] - TestLangPacks: Added version stamping into use for various files.
* [IZPACK-132] - TestLangPacks: application name and version are taken from Manifest.mf file. Documentation update.
* [IZPACK-134] - TestLangPacks: Tag for version 1.0-beta1
* [IZPACK-137] - TestLangPacks: Added license file.
* [IZPACK-139] - Italian langpack update.
* [IZPACK-143] - TestLangPacks: Documentation update.
* [IZPACK-144] - TestLangPacks: Tag for version 1.0.

My websites at izpack.org, izforge.com and this blog have been hacked tonight around 3am

My hosting provider has recovered a backup from early september. I will progressively refresh the content that had been edited since then.

Thanks for your comprehension…

Edit: I should have restored nearly everything now… please let me know if you notice anything missing. Thanks!

P.S.: I hate PHP. Seriously.

As announced in the IzPack news, I have made available some IzPack Git repositories on GitHub.

The idea is not to run away from the Subversion repository that we host at Codehaus, but rather to provide a distributed SCM option. Indeed, I am using the Git features that allow a 2-way synchronization between Subversion and Git.

The whole idea is to try to leverage Git to break the barrier between developers and contributors, as with Subversion one needs to be a commiter. Also, I expect that the easy branching in Git will favour experimentations and staging of patches before they get properly incorporated into our Subversion codebase.

I have to admit that I have never been a huge fan of Git, as its interface is not really user-friendly, and it is less at ease on Windows. While one can easily use Git on basic workflows, it helps a lot to have some computer science knowledge as you try to use more complicated functionnalities of the tool. Indeed you should understand how Git works internally if you want to avoid misusing them. In this regard Mercurial is a much better tool.

One thing that won me to play with Git is simply GitHub. It offers some really neat features such as online editing / commiting, commenting on commits (useful for peer-reviewing) and the ability for people to fork projects and facilitate interactions between developers.

There are 3 repositories:

• https://github.com/jponge/izpack/tree
• https://github.com/jponge/izpack-launcher/tree
• https://github.com/jponge/izpack-utils/tree

You will notice that the ‘izpack’ repository contains a special branch called ‘with-git-submodules’. The IzPack Subversion repository leverages ’svn:externals’ to fetch the other two projects (IzPack launcher and IzPack utilities). Git has a notion of submodules, but it fails to commit back to Subversion if you have submodules in the current branch, which is really anoying. That’s why only this branch has the submodules and will be kept in sync with the master and trunk-clone branches.

Feel-free to grab a GitHub account and fork the projects!

I’m quite late on writing a note for this but here it is: Christopher Kampmeier from Sun wrote a deep article on the IzPack / Sun IPS integration that I started to make on a Glassfish v3 Prelude build. I must say that the article is very well written, big thanks to you Christopher for writing this! (+ such a nice article is a good personal boost )

It covers both the initial installation with IzPack and the interactions with the update center tools. Last but not least, there are plenty of screenshots

Eduardo recently mentioned that I would make updates soon … as time permits. It’s true that these days I haven’t been that much available, but hopefuly next week I should be able to publish an update of the Glassfish v3 installer.

Not only will the update be based on a fresher GFv3 build, but it will also contain some due fixes. The most important one is to make it work on Windows (I could not test it when I made the installer…), as the current version fails to work because of spaces in paths… a very common problem when launching external processes on Windows. There are also some minor other things that Christopher mentioned and that I will take into account.

Stay tuned!

I’m happy to announce that a release candidate is available for testing.

You can get it from http://snapshots.dist.codehaus.org/izpack/IzPack-install-4.1.0-rc.jar.

Thanks for testing and reporting us any issue!