I have finished developing my java application using netbeans. Now I want to give it to others. How can I change it so that user can directly install and run my application without having to run it from IDE or command line.
Thank you
You have a few options:
If "install" means an icon to click on and run your app, you can create an installer to do so. You don't specify your target operating system. I'd recommend Googling for installers like Wise.
You can create an executable JAR with a launch command file for users to execute.
You can use Java Web Start.
You'll have to assume that your user base has a JVM of the correct version installed and available for your app to use.
You don't say anything about databases or other services, so I'll assume that you have a main method that you want to launch.
For a simple application with no dependencies, the easy way is to create an executable JAR file.
For a complicated application, you need to package up the primary JAR and the other things that it depends on, and present that in a way that the user can install. This might be a simple ZIP file (or equivalent) for the user to unzip. (That is the way that Eclipse and is distributed for example). Alternatively, it might be a fancy installer ... which you would need to write or generate. (There are a variety of installer generators out there: some free / open source, others commercial.)
Basically, you need to balance "ease of installation" for the user against the amount of effort (and money) you are prepared to spend on creating installer infrastructure for your application.
Alternatively, if you are prepared for the application to be hosted on and launched from a web server, then Java WebStart is a good alternative to an installer, not least because it removes the need to get the user to reinstall to pick up newer versions of your application.
Look into some free packaging installer like presented in here.
You should understand how your application should be setup on a "clean" machine and describe it to the tool you use.
I've used IZPack in the past and am very pleased with it.You will also need to know how to package your app into jars/wars/ears (or other).
I hope this gives you a staring point.
You can give JSmooth a try and see how it works for you. I haven't used it before but a co-worker of mine has several times and he seemed to be happy with it.
Related
I have a jar file which contains two Java classes. Using the javamail API I have developed these classes to read and edit my mail, then send to another mail id.
I am able to execute this through my standalone system via Eclipse. Now I want to host this jar file somewhere remotely so that it would fetch the data in real time and execute the job regularly. I have contacted couple of hosting sites and they are saying that they require a war file instead.
Does anyone have any suggestions to this problem?
To give you another point of view and to be constructive, I would go with embedding your jar into a war application and you get some things for free, the most important I think is that you gain a managed application lifecycle so with a standard web application context listener you can start and stop your program in a managed way. Besides you have more hosting options and it is less work.
Good luck with that.
As I don't know of any services specifically for plain execution of executables, your best bet is probably getting a cheap VPS. With some searching you can probably find one that would work for around $5 USD/month. For a single simple app you'd only need around 128MB of memory.
Pick one up, install Java (whatever Linux distro you get probably has OpenJDK in the repositories), copy your files over, and set up a cron job to run the executable at a set interval.
For easier administration, install something like webmin and use that to configure the cron job. The command would likely just be java -jar /path/to/my/App.jar, and you can use the web interface to configure the intervals for the command to be executed.
For an app like this, I would avoid anything related to a war file. You aren't making an application with a web interface (like a PHP app or some such) so it really wouldn't be appropriate. You would have to write some extra code to make it compatible with a container like Tomcat, and on top of that the memory requirements for running the application server would be a lot higher.
I am developing an inventory system i-e a java desktop application. I am using Ms Access as database engine and there are certain modules e.g one makes reports using ireport and other such dependencies. I need to ask how can I make installer for my application which will install few fonts, copy database files, install jre to make it run etc. Please guide me in it.
Thanks in anticipation.
This is something I've briefly used in the past, and it may serve your needs. It's an open source installer builder system, tailored towards Java apps.
http://izpack.org/
I've used jsmooth which creates a single EXE-file that unpacks and run transparently. Not a full installer but worked well for us.
Note: I have not seen any Java installers which asks the "There is an update available. Update now?" question.
If this is important to you, then consider Java WebStart which checks for updates at each launch (but do not ask).
I want to create an installer using Java that install at first MySQL. The user tape at first the password of root user. Then the installer copy jar file into program files and create shortcut on desktop.
So my question how to install MySQL automatic via Java. Is there any way??
Thanks in advance.
best regards,
Ali
Depends on the platforms you want to install onto. Basically if you know how to do it via the command line, then you can write a shell script that is executed from Java, or a series of command line statements that are executed from Java to do it.
Since you mention root user, I'm guessing some flavor of linux? Doesn't MySQL already have ways of doing this that come with the installers and/or binary distributions?
This write-up might help you in creating a java installer: Convert Java to EXE (also has information about other platforms)
But, before going for that, I would like to ask you, why do you want o bundle MySQL with your java app? The recommended way, if you want a DBMS bundled in your app can be:
Ask the user the install MySQL him self. You app will use it.
Use SqLite (embedded RDBMS). Or even simpler, Berkley DB for a Key-value store. This approach will be super light and no installation needed.
You can try to perform a 'private' ad-hoc MySQL installation that is only used by your application: that means you will have to copy the binaries (please note they are different for each platform) plus some custom configuration files to a 'mysql' subdirectory of your programs' main directory.
I can assure you it won't be easy and fast to do. You have to struggle a bit making it work under each platform. This kind of stuff is always a bit tricky.
If you prefer to install MySQL in a system-wide manner (as a service, using the provided install package) you'll have to embed the package into your setup program and then use the proper operating system commands to install it. That would be different on each platform, and under Linux you'll have to install the proper package for each distro. Messy.
You can look at some commercial solutions for making Java install programs. See install4j for example.
Shipping MySQL with your Java application is not so easy. Are you sure you need MySQL, and you cannot use some simpler alternatives, like sqlite? If you choose sqlite, there are some 100% java solutions, and that means no difference between platforms and easy deploy of your application.
Think about it, listening to this simple advice can make you save 14-15 hours of work and debugging (with always some possibility of failure, because complex installers do fail).
I'm trying to figure out a way to add a self-update feature to a Java/Swing application I'm working on.
Basically I've got a bunch of jar files with extra functionality to be re-deployed to the installed users when they change. Nothing complicated, just check if a new version has been released, download them over HTTP, and then optionally offer to restart the app to the user.
I had a look at webstart, and it could work. But this particular app does some funky stuff with classloading and GC memory settings that don't look like they are supported via webstart, or will at least complicate matters. (It's a tweaked build of JMeter)
I also went down the road of adding in this plugin handler http://swing-fx.blogspot.com/2008/06/add-auto-update-and-plugins-to-your.html, but it is very alpha, and tries to do too much with the usual bugs you get with alpha stuff.
I did the exact same thing. But that was long back so there are probably better tools today.
What I found out I needed was a loader. The loader main program did not have the app jars in classpath. It first downloaded an update if required and then created a custom classloader with the app jars in class path and invoked the main method of the application main class. It is not very complicated. IIRC I needed to do this because the jars could not be overwritten in windows if they were already in classpath.
Hope this helps.
we had a swing app 6 years ago that had self-update. like you suggested,
1)it downloaded the latest jars over http,
2) copied them to a folder.
3) since the swing app is launched using a .BAT file, after user said YES, we would shut down the swing app and look for any files in the update folder. if yes, launch another .BAT file to copy the NEW JARs to the required directory.
4) then re launch the swing app.
Updates, plugins, separation of concern etc. are exactly what OSGi is about - you might want to take a look at this. It won't come free (read: with a steep initial learning curve, especially when you are currently using classloading tricks) at least there are good open source implementations (felix - see felix.apache.org, equinox - see www.eclipse.org and others)
For these implementations autoupdaters are available - if you write your modules correctly it's possible to update at runtime without restarting.
I believe you should look again at Java WebStart, or at least detail the "funky classloading" which you think is going to cause problems (as it might also cause problems with any solution proposed here).
IIRC, you can set command line parameters using Java WebStart ( http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/javaws/developersguide/syntax.html#resources ).
I would definitely first try out Webstart. We've had lots of success launching even the early Eclipse RCP apps using Webstart, and you can probably not get more funky classloading issues than with the OSGI framework (Eclipse Equinox).
Could you perhaps give some more detail in your question about you classloading approach?
Regarding the GC and other VM settings: these are easy to specify in your JNLP (Java Network Launching Protocol) files used by Webstart for launching apps.
The Java Web Start is good choice. The GC stuff is not important. Classloading could be problem. But when you got trusted by user you can grant AllPermisions and you will be able to do custom classloading. Maybe it will be good to reconsider funky stuff with classloading. It is really necessary? Or look at NetBeans. There should be found inspiration for auto-update.
Is it possible to integrate a Matlab program into a Chrome extension using the Matlab Builder JA?
Essentially, I have a computational tool in Matlab that I want to make more user-friendly and widely-available for other researchers with few or no programming skills. The best way to do this seems to be deploying it on the web--and, since I don't have access to a web server, in a Chrome extension. In order to deploy Matlab on the web via Java, it seems I need to upload the JRE or JDK and do a lot of other configurations on a server, like in http://www.mathworks.com/help/javabuilder/web-deployment.html (need a Matlab account to view).
Any workarounds for the extension that don't require a web server? Or other ideas to distribute my package to non-programmers so that they can use it?
Thanks!
I was in a similar situation, and I solved it in a slightly more elegant way than trying to play with web plugins:
In order to make the functions of my package accessible to non-programmers, I built a very simple GUI using guide in matlab, which allowed users to open data files, choose processing parameters, run the analysis, and export the results. Guide is very simple to use, and there are some good tutorials online. Then in terms of distributing it, I packaged all the necessary matlab files into a single folder, and then wrote a bash script (linux/mac) that would copy the files into a sensible directory, make a shortcut in /usr/bin/ (so that the GUI could be opened directly from the command line by running scatter_analysis without invoking any other display from matlab), and finally make a double-clickable shortcut on the desktop. The only prerequisite is that the user has matlab installed already.
I presume you're using windows, which I know nothing about, but I think it's likely that you can come up with a similar solution on the windows platform with far less effort than wrestling with web plugins? Unfortunately I cannot share my code - I'm in the process of selling it and any disclosure would violate the terms of the sale.