What's the best way to distribute Java applica

Question

Java is one of my programming languages of choice. I always run into the problem though of distributing my application to end-users.

Giving a user a JAR is not always as user friendly as I would like and using Java WebStart requires that I maintain a web server.

What's the best way to distribute a Java application? What if the Java application needs to install artifacts to the user's computer? Are there any good Java installation/packaging systems out there?

Answer 1

I needed a way to package my project and its dependencies into a single jar file.

I found what I needed using the Maven2 Assembly plugin: Maven2 Assembly plugin

This appears to duplicate the functionality of one-jar, but requires no additional configuration to get it going.

Answer 2

It depends on how sophisticated your target users are. In most cases you want to isolate them from the fact that you are running a Java-based app. Give them with a native installer that does the right thing (create start menu entries, launchers, register with add/remove programs, etc.) and already bundles a Java runtime (so the user does not need to know or care about it). I would like to suggest our cross platform installation tool, BitRock InstallBuilder. Although it is not Java-based, it is commonly used to package Java applications. It can be easily integrated with Ant and you can build Windows installers from Unix/Linux/Mac and the other way around. Because the generated installers are native, they do not require a self-extraction step or a JRE to be already present in the target system, which means smaller installers and saves you some headaches. I also would like to mention we have free licenses for open source projects

Answer 3

advanced installer makes it easy to package java apps as windows executables, and it's quite flexible in the way you can set it up. I've found that for distributing java applications to windows clients, this is the easiest way to go.

Answer 4

I develop eclipse RCP applications. Normally to start an eclipse application an executable launcher is included. I include the java virtual machine inside the application folder in a /jre sub directory to ensure that the right java version will be used.

Then we package with Inno Setup for installation on the user's machine.

Answer 5

Well from my point of view the superior distribution mechanism is to use something like ClickOnce, or WebStart technology. You just deploy the version to the server and it gets automatically to the clients when the version is released. Also the Eclipse RCP platform contains UpdateManager that does what WebStart do, but also much more.

Since I am using Maven2 for building, the deployment is just a piece of cake: copy the built jar to the location on the server, update the jnlp file if needed and you are done.

Answer 6

For simple Java apps I like to use Jar's. It is very simple to distribute one file that a user can just click on (Windows), or

java -jar jarname.jar

IMHO, jar is the way to go when simplicity is a main requirement.