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By veerakm
via javabyexample.wisdomplug.com
Published: Jun 16 2008 / 16:47

Make an Installer for your Java Applications with these 10 free tools
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jtheory replied ago:

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That's a lot of up-votes.... The vast majority of these "installer" builders are not much use, though. I've tried most of them, unfortunately.

Think about basic requirements for an installer -- sensible defaults, license click-through, shortcuts in the right place for various OSes, an uninstaller that users will be able to execute in the "expected" way, etc.. It's not a simple task.

And for Java-based installers -- if you don't have an executable wrapper of some kind, if the user doesn't have Java pre-installed on the PC they're going to be very confused (there's no useful error message at all).

IZPack is passable, though the install experience is still very clunky. I've used that before, wrapping my app with Launch4J to build an executable (and again for the installer) for Windows that doesn't require a JVM to run -- I need to at least give the user a helpful error message! -- but still non-Java based installers (like NullSoft's installer) are way ahead.

A comment mentions http://openInstaller.org -- I spend a half-hour trying to figure that one out; it looks interesting, but the documentation is still quite poor (not at all comprehensive, and requires digging through various PDFs... blah) and I wasn't able to figure out how to meet the basic requirements above.

Any other suggestions out there? There are, of course, paid solutions... but they tend to be far to pricey for small developers.

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