InstallAnywhere : Java Glossary

The following information comes from my experience with the product since 2001. Some of what I say may be dated.

The are 14 versions. The simplest, InstallAnywhere standadard costs $1200.00 USD . It is a snap to use. It creates a *.exe for windows and a *.bin script for Unix (processor independent! clever eh?), and a Mac version too if your program can run under the Mac’s Java. The installer adds the program to the menu with an icon. The problems with the free version include:

1. If you ask it to install the JVM, it makes a private copy. Every app gets its own copy of the JVM. You soon fill up your client’s disks with duplicate copies of the JVM.
2. If the end user has several JVMs installed it asks the user which to use. Most end users have no clue what to answer. You can’t configure the JVM required at build time.
3. You or the user cannot independently control whether an icon appears on the desktop, task bar, or start menu.
4. If you include an entire directory in the distribution, then add yet another jar to that directory, it will not be included. You must delete the directory and re-add it.
5. It does not work at all under Windows 98! I have not tested the latest version to see if this bug has been fixed. version 6.0 could not find installed JVMs. Even when the end user manually finds java.exe for it, it only copies some of the necessary files to the install directory. It works fine under NT, however. Their email robot expressed no interest in hearing about the bug. They wanted me to pay them $70.00 USD for doing them a favour of reporting the bug.
6. You can’t specify whether included data files should override the user’s existing files or not. They always replace.
7. The version 3.5 has more customisation powers, but it is flaky. It did many strange things and then gradually stopped doing them, without rhyme nor reason.
8. Even without JVM you add about 1 MB to your executable download size and roughly the same amount to the installed executable. Ideally this overhead should be downloaded once, not once per app.

I have exchanged many emails and phone calls with the InstallAnywhere people. I hope they follow my advice and make the free InstallAnywhereNow more foolproof for the end user, but limit it to tiny apps. Instead they dropped the product.

Unfortunately version 4 still gaves you no way to control which VM your app gets connected to. Its downloads are about 200k bigger than version 3.5, a little over a megabyte of overhead on each download, exclusive of the VM. The main new feature of version 4 is the ability to include a jar file that is automatically expanded as part of the install. InstallAnywhereNow does not have a way of pre-installing the generic installer once, the way you can with Web Start which would remove that overhead. The advantage is the downloads are totally self-contained.

version 5 has the power update feature similar to JNLP for automatically installing upgrades to your customers. The major enhancement in the use of XML files to control the installer. This product is now defunct.

I tested version 6.1. It is in some ways even worse than earlier versions.

• To include other than the Macrovision default JVM, you must download VMPACKS from Macrovsion before you do your builds and put them in your F:\Program Files\InstallAnywhere 6 Standard\resource\installer_vms directory.
• The Applet style install aborted three times without error message when I tried the download of InstallAnywhere itself. The download was only partly complete. The style where you select the platform yourself behaved normally.
• When the user installs your app in Windows, he is given a multiple choice radio button question "where would you like to create the product icons?" Usually he wants them all, not just one. These should be checkboxes, not radio buttons.

  

  ZeroG has acknowledged the problem and has logged a fix as a feature request.

• The NoVM Windows install fails, even though when the necesary JVMs are already installed. ZeroG acknowledges the problem and suggest either always bundling the JVM or using a command line such as this to launch the install that manually selects a JVM.

  install.exe LAX_VM C:\jre\bin\java.exe

• It is not clever enough to automatically put jars you include on the classpath, not even the one containing the main class. However, it lets you add entire directories or entire jars to the classpath just by ticking a box. You don’t have to compose a giant classpath yourself. You can see what it has decided to put on the classpath in Project ⇒ Java ⇒ Classpath Settings
• Its launcher is a small C program called main.exe that looks for a text file called main.lax which tells it where to find the JRE, the name of the main class to launch and the classpath.

Integration with Ant