making an installer and installing the libraries if not already installed

Question

How can i make up am installer for my java application (jar file) . The same as that of windows installer which proceeds by clicking next and installs the application. What i want with my java app is, the open source library xuggler to get installed if it is not already present in the system.Then i want JRE to get installed if it is not already present in the system.

If the user does not have xuggler or JRE installed , installer should automatically install the xuggler and JRE. Or it should tell the user to get that version of libraries from the given URL and then continue.

Answer 1

If your app. has a GUI, use deployJava.js for the JRE and then Java Web Start to install/launch the app.

An installer-desc can be specified in the JNLP file to install Xuggle. JWS can partition the download between OS.

JWS is supplied by the makers of J2SE JREs for desktop PCs (e.g. running Mac OSX, *nix or Windows).

Answer 2

Your question is similar to this one:
how to package a java application
Advanced Installer has a separate edition especially for creating installers for Java apps, so this might be what you are looking for. I would recommend other tools but since they're scriptable, they're a hassle to work with, lots of things can go wrong.

Hope this helps

Answer 3

NullSoft have a very good scriptable, opensource installer called NSIS.

http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page

Answer 4

I'm not aware of a cross platform way to do this. In the Windows world, you can use Wix to generate an MSI file, and in that file you can specify dependencies such as the JRE. In the Linux world you can generate a file with the dependencies read by the package manager, a deb file for Debian based releases for example. It's a bit of a faff to set things like this up separately, but once it's done you can just integrate it into your ant script and build everything automatically.