]> 2004Julien PONGE Redistribution and use in source (XML DocBook) and 'compiled' forms (XML, (X)HTML, PDF, PostScript, RTF and so forth) with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: Redistributions of source code (XML DocBook) must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer as the first lines of this file unmodified. Redistributions in compiled form (transformed to other DTDs, converted to PDF, PostScript, RTF and other formats) must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. Important: THIS DOCUMENTATION IS PROVIDED BY THE IZPACK PROJECT "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE IZPACK PROJECT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS DOCUMENTATION, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. The IzPack project allows you to prepare some installers for your applications. Those installers can be used identically no matter what the target operating system is because it has been implemented with the Java technology. This means that the same installer file can be distributed to your Linux, FreeBSD, Win32 and Mac users. While this is already a big advantage over preparing an installer or a package for each platform, it still relies on the hypothesis that your users already have a well installed Java Runtime Environment (JRE) on their systems. While corporate users should be able to install a JRE by themselves, this might not always be the case. Worse, the average home user might not know what a JRE is and he might not understand why your installer can't be launched. The IzPack native launcher solves the previous problem by offering a native executable to your users. Thus, they will launch it instead of directly trying to launch the Java-based installer. What's more, Win32 users will be more familiar with a native executable than a Jar file. The IzPack launcher will do the following things when executed: check for a JVM on the system launch the installer if a valid JVM has been found offer the following choices in case no JVM could be found: manually locate a 'java' executable (optional) install a JVM that is provided by the package maker, for instance on a CD-ROM download a JVM from the internet

The IzPack launcher is implemented in C++ and makes use of the portable wxWidgets toolkit. Thus, the IzPack launcher can be run on several platforms (*nix, MacOS, Win32). It has been successfully tested on the following platforms configurations: Linux / wxGTK / GCC FreeBSD / wxGTK / GCC Win32 / MSW / MinGW The IzPack launcher is published under a MIT-style license agreement: &launcher-license; The IzPack launcher can be downloaded from BerliOS of from the IzPack homepage. IzPack makes use of SubVersion. You can download the development version ('trunk') by following the instructions at http://developer.berlios.de/svn/?group_id=1408 You can also get here the various releases ('tags'). The IzPack launcher archive comes with the full source code, the documentation as well as a sample configuration file. It also contains a build for the Win32 platform, so that you can use it directly on this platform. First of all, you can put in a fresh directory the Win32 executable that you can find in the 'dist' directory of the IzPack launcher distribution. You can also pick the manifest file that will make the launcher GUI use the XP look and feel. Then you can also pick the translations that you need by copying the related directories. Finally, you'll need to create a launcher.ini configuration file in order to tweak the launcher behaviour. The configuration file is quite simple. It has groups and entries. The top-level entries (those not belonging to a group) can be overridden by some operating system ones. To customize the behaviour for a specific operating system, you just have to create a group whose name matches the operating system identifier. Then you can simply override the entries. The entries are the following: jar: specifies the installer Jar file to launch jre: the path to a JRE that the user can install if none has been found on his system download: the URL to get a JVM from. The 'jre' entry is not mandatory. The following operating systems identifiers can be used to make groups: win32 linux solaris bsd mac &sample-launcher-ini; Marcus Stursberg (German translation) Frank Bille Jensen (Danish translation) Elmar Grom (user feedback suggestions) Alex Carlos Braga Antao (Brazilian translation) David Perez Carmona (Spanish translation) Dustin Sacks (Win98 fixes) The BerliOS crew The wxWidgets crew.