JPz’log

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

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.

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

The IzPack Glassfish installer has just been updated. It now provides a deeper integration on Windows systems.

Shortcuts to asadmin, the update center and the uninstaller are now created in the start menu hierarchy:

The Windows Add / Remove Software settings box will also display an icon for the Glassfish installation:

Lastly, the installer was generated from a snapshot of the IzPack Subversion trunk.

Oh and I forgot one more thing: the Glassfish installer has been downloaded at least 1326 times in May