IzPack Java Installer
Overview
IzPack is an installers generator for the Java platform. It produces lightweight installers that can be run on any operating system where a Java virtual machine is available. Depending on the operating system, it can be launched by a double-click or a simple java -jar installer.jar from a shell. The most common use is to distribute applications for the Java platform, but you can also use it for other kinds of projects. The main benefit of IzPack is that it provides a clean and unique way of distributing a project to users using different operating systems. IzPack is reported to run on:
- Unix-like systems, mostly Linux and FreeBSD variants
- Mac OS X
- Windows 2000, XP and Vista.
A big care has been put in making IzPack as small as possible in order to reduce the weight of IzPack itself in the final installer archive. Also, IzPack has been designed around modularity and flexibility. As a consequence, you are able to specify how your installer should be by selecting the panels that you want to show to the final user. Sometimes there are even several panels for the same usage so that you can pick the one that suits the best your needs. If ever you don’t find your way through the available panels, you can still develop your own ones with the nice and easy IzPack API.
Main features
- XML-based installer descriptors
- Uses the maximum Jar archives compression level
- Apache Ant integration
- Great flexibility and modularity, it is very easy to extend IzPack
- No native code is required, but you can extend IzPack with native code
- Shortcuts creation system (Win32 and FreeDesktop.org)
- Flexible and powerful user input panel
- Automatic uninstaller creation
- Easy localization with XML langpacks: many translations are provided by default
- Variables substitution system
- OS-specific scripts interaction
- … and many more!
Licensing
IzPack is licensed under the terms of the liberal opensource Apache Software License version 2.0.
