Introduction
As part part of the Software Development processes, writing Software Installers is usually needed, especially for non-Web applications.
Application framework launchers such as ClassWorlds can leverage the process of writing Application Launchers.
It’s often desirable to have the Software Installer generation process as part of your build process. Ideally you want to be able to build, package and optionally deploy in a single step.
Overview of the Gradle ClassWorlds Assembly Plugin
The Gradle ClassWorlds Assembly Plugin is a plugin for use with the Gradle build tool.
The Gradle ClassWorlds Assembly Plugin generates a zip distribution of your application artifacts and dependencies. The plugin leverages the ClassWorlds launcher framework to bootstrap your program launching process.
The main goal of the Gradle ClassWorlds Assembly plugin is to provide a quick and easy way to distribute an application via zip files.
For more sophisticated needs, you’d consider real full blown Software Installers such as InstallAnyWhere.
The benefit of Zip distributions
As a software provider, you want to provide the best installation experience to the users of your product.
A very nice Windows installer or RPM package may not always be the best option to share your application!
zip distributions are often very convenient in many cases:
- No administration rights needed most of the time, which is useful when you don’t have administrative rights on a machine.
- One step installation, just a matter of extracting a software archive.
- Easy uninstallation, which is a simple folder deletion.
- On most Operating Systems, there’s a built-in archive utility that can extract zip files contents.
Gradle ClassWorlds Assembly Plugin information.
GitHub page
The Gradle ClassWorlds Plugin project is available on GitHub.
Please give it a try!
Introduction ScreenCast
Below is a screencast showcasing the features and usage of the Gradle Classworlds plugin.
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