MyJavaPack is a platform independent installer of Java developer goodies. This distribution contains valuable, up to date, Open Source software. The software breakdown is: dev tools (e.g. Ant, Eclipse), frameworks (e.g. Hibernate, Spring, Struts, Velocity), servers (e.g. JBoss, Tomcat, HSQL, MySQL), and admin tools (e.g. MySQL Administrator, Webmin).

Thoughts from John Munsch

MyJavaPack Home is open source software trying to fill basically the same niche. It does installation of lots of Java development tools and a few common open source tools that aren't just for Java (e.g. MySQL). It doesn't have as many different tools it can install nor does it offer to install example projects which use subsets of the other tools to confirm that installed everything correctly or to give you a quick starting point for your own work. But even without those, its $0 price tag and open source could make it a popular choice for people who want a quick and dirty solution to setting up a development environment (and it's more IT people and team leads than you may think).

I hope future versions of both packages emphasize installation of groups of software based on common sets you see in work. Ant, Log4J, etc. would always be installed but there could be a group for web applications that would include Tomcat and/or JBoss plus Spring, a web service group could have Axis and/or Apache XML-RPC in it, a graphical UI one could install the JGoodies Forms and L2FProd.com's Common Components. Toss in some sample apps or even better, some templates for applications using Megg and you've got a hell of a starter kit.

Thoughts from Matt Raible

I was quite impressed. All it did was download the packages I requested and installed them. In most cases, this is what I want - especially on my machine where I already have everything setup. Blue Glue goes a bit further than MyJavaPack. It installs and configures everything for you. This is great for brand new machines, but can be a pain for pre-configured machines since it adds stuff to your PATH.

The thing I like about MyJavaPack is that it's open-source. Therefore, I might be able to dig in and customize it for an AppFuse-based installer. Such an installer would include tools for developing AppFuse: Ant, Tomcat, MySQL, Eclipse and AppFuse. That'd be pretty cool to be able to download and install an entire development environment.

Neither product does what we all really want: the ability to do an "update" (like Windows Update or Software Update on OS X) of our existing packages.

Visit the MyJavaPack home page

I haven't used Maven so my comments might be prematues. Doesn't maven provide the functionality of downloading the lates opent source tools mentioned in .xml file and much more.

Thanks.
Neeraj

I haven't used Maven so my comments might be prematues. Doesn't maven provide the functionality of downloading the lates opent source tools mentioned in .xml file and much more.Thanks.Neeraj

Yes it does. I simply love maven for the sheer fact of avoid coping jar files from one lib to another, every time you have to setup an environment for new project (ant based environment). Besides it has plug-in architecture, project hierarchy maintainance, automatic dependency download features etc are some of them that makes maven a better choice.

Thank you,

Ali

Just to append to my earlier comments, maven is not a installer. It is targetted for development environments. You can compare maven with ant. But it sopports tag based scripting using which you can do a lot.

Thank you

Ali

MyJavaPack uses IzPack installer generator.

MyJavaPack is just an easy to install package of 35 Java products.

Nebojsa

Maven sux :-)

I haven't used Maven so my comments might be prematues. Doesn't maven provide the functionality of downloading the lates opent source tools mentioned in .xml file and much more.Thanks.Neeraj

You can do it with Ant too :

http://howardlewisship.com/blog/2004/05/maven-like-downloads-for-ant.html

I too tried MyJavaPack and liked its clean simplicity. In regards to the ability to update existing packages, that certainly would make it even more attractive. Albeit, with more power comes more complexity.

Wouldn't it have to be able to obtain certain administrative priviledges in order to perform the updates? Or, if you're already logged in as administrator before running MyJavaPack, would that be sufficient? Hopefully, James Williams (MyJavaPack's creator) will consider adding the ability to update packages to a near-future release. I can see it being a great benefit to coporate IT shops interested in keeping a large installed base of applications in sync. In addition, it made setting up a J2EE development environment in my lab very painless.

MyJavaPack does not install Apache web server. That's a question. :-)
http://open-centric.com/myjavapack/documentation.html and more...

is the whole My* naming convention...

Re installer tools for J2EE apps: I have just put up http://antinstaller.sourceforge.net/ its only a beta at present but it provides a user friendly front end for ant installer with the back end of Ant... And it works on the command line and is GPL + apache licensed.