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.

(the title is just a joke BTW… or maybe not after all, who knows?)

I recently decided to revamp my academic homepage and use some nicer tools than what I had been using before. I chose a drastic solution: I bought the ponge.info domain name and switched it over to Google Apps. For the very low-price of a domain name, I am now putting most of my stuff “in the cloud”, and I must admit that I like very much!

First off I used to redirect my professional email addresses to GMail, as I’m much more efficient with it than with a traditional MUA. Oh and it filters spam so well! The first thing I did was to create an email address on the domain for this purpose. This way I have now a “professional” mailbox with all the benefits of GMail, minus the problems of having my personal and work emails mixed together.

The second thing I activated was Google Docs. I’m using OpenOffice.org all the way for office things (minus LaTeX for serious writing and Apple Keynote for presentations). Given that Google Docs is highly friendly both ways with the OpenOffice.org documents, I’ll have a place to put some materials like teaching lectures, quick notes and so on.

I have also activated Google Sites, the very nice wiki solution that they provide. I like the fact that you can quickly put up sites online. I have already added one for my publications, and I already envision to create spaces for some of my lectures, and put assignments and other teaching materials here. Great stuff, really.

The last thing I did was to set-up some web pages at http://julien.ponge.info/. This content is expected to be relatively static anyway, so all I wanted was an easy-to-use solution for editing pages remotely with minimal efforts. The editor is not as great as the Sites/Docs ones, and I had to fight it at times. The themes are ok, but you should probably avoid looking at the source code… and obviously you should offer more themes, Mr Google.

I’m quite satisfied with it anyway: the page creator fits the need in the end of the day. Indeed, if you browse the pages content, you will also discover that:

• I’m not the typical academic
• I’m industry-friendly
• I’m under contract for one year with my university (this is not renewable, and things are pretty much open after that)
• I’m interested in a new research direction that should fit me quite well, and for which there are tons of applications: “Next-generation version control and software distribution infrastructures”.

Feel-free to share you experiences with Google Apps and/or thoughts on the rest of this post

I’m glad to announce that IzPack now supports Pack200 compression (see the related JIRA entry).

Pack200 compression offers a drastic reduction of the installers size. The flip side of the coin is of course that it takes much longer to create an installer

On the IzPack installer itself, enabling Pack200 reduces the installer by 4Mb.

The way it works is simple: all you need to do is add an empty pack200 tag in your info section of your installers, then every JAR that is added to a pack is compressed. As a special exception, signed JARs are not compressed using Pack200 (remember that Pack200 is only semantic-preserving). It should also be noted that the Pack200 compression that has been implemented is highly aggressive as it also strips debug symbols. Feel-free to send us a patch if you would like a more fine-grained Päck200 compression.

Here is a small excerpt:

<info>
   <appname>IzPack</appname>
   <appversion>4.0.0</appversion>
   (...)
   <requiresjdk>no</requiresjdk>
   <pack200/>
   (...)
</info>

If you want to test the feature, you will need to get IzPack from its Subversion trunk.

Finally, there is more to come in IzPack 4.1 in terms of installers footprint reduction. I’m really glad that Google released Protocol Buffers, as I was going to develop a similar binary data encoding system. Indeed, IzPack currently relies a lot on Java objects serialization (which is costly), so switching to more compact data encodings will drastically reduce the size of installers. My personal test case for this will be Glassfish v3 from Sun. Stay tuned