JPz’log

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!

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