JPz’log

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!

Today I worked on preparing an IzPack-based installer for Glassfish v3.

I started by deriving from the work I did for v2, took the latest promoted build and tuned it. The result is that:

1. the installer is able to bootstrap the update center (even behind a proxy)
2. Glassfish v3 can be started after having been installed (amazingly fast!)
3. the installer weights several megabytes less than the “official” platform-specific installers (and should I mention that IzPack IS cross-platform?)

Remember that this is only a few hours of work and that I could not test it properly on something else than Mac OS X 10.4, … but you should reasonably expect it to work.

You can grab 2 installers:

• the “good” installer
• the “bad” installer.

I named the second one “bad installer” as it uses a hardcore Pack200 compression. The resulting installer is only 15M, but Glassfish fails to start properly. I make it available for download as I’m interested in knowing where the problem is. Is Apache Felix or another component unhappy with Pack200?

Anyway thanks for reporting any issue you might encounter. I expect to improve it further in the future. Especially, interacting with the update center after it has been bootstrapped would be useful (e.g., for installing third-party modules straight from the installer).

I am please to announce that 2 new versions of IzPack have been released!

The complete details are available from
the official announcement.

If you are impatient to package one, deploy everywhere, you may also directly go to the IzPack downloads page

I’m in a hurry, so here are two quick news:

1. the official news will now be hosted from our Confluence space at Codehaus (the switch is transparent for Feedburner subscribers)
2. like most Atlassian tools, Confluence is such a superb piece of software that I have launched a call for contributors to rewrite the documentation there (if you have reasonable writing skills then please step-up!)

You can now officially download a cross-platform installer for Groovy!

I’ll prepare an updated version within the next few days with some important patches from the current development versions.