Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

JDeploy – Deploy desktop Java apps as native bundles on Mac, Linux, and Windows

jdeploy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 133 posts

Re: JDeploy – Deploy desktop Java apps as native bundles on Mac, Linux, and Windows

#51

Post by BeefWellington »

shannah78 wrote: post #47
BeefWellington wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking for myself, I could see this being useful to me if you targeted any kind of S3 target, along with something like Github Releases. Even just outputting the results to a filesystem location would be simple and appease a good chunk of the HN crowd I suspect. Similar to GP I wouldn't be trusting NPM with this kind of thing. For the convenience factor of it though, you should definitely leave that in place.

> Similar to GP I wouldn't be trusting NPM with this kind of thing Have there been some events that cast doubt on the trustworthiness of NPM? vs, say Github?

No, I'd probably put them in the same category. This is why I suggested a filesystem output. Github is just popular and having something that could add it as a release to a repo would probably improve popularity of the project.

Re: JDeploy – Deploy desktop Java apps as native bundles on Mac, Linux, and Windows

#52

Post by teaearlgraycold »

shannah78 wrote: post #2

This is a passion project of mine to make it easier to deploy Java desktop apps. I'm very happy with the result, as IMO, the process is orders of magnitudes simpler than what we had before. Some features include: - Native installers for Mac, Windows, and Linux - Build native bundles for all platforms from any platform (e.g. You don't need Mac to make a Mac app. You don't need Windows to make a Windows app, etc..) - A…

> Auto updates. Your users automatically get the latest version on each launch

How do you handle this? Are there hooks so that desktop apps can know to migrate state that's on disk?

Re: JDeploy – Deploy desktop Java apps as native bundles on Mac, Linux, and Windows

#53

Post by RandyRanderson »

shannah78 wrote: post #7
cosmotic wrote: post #6

This does indeed solve a significant burden. Relying on npm seems a bit awkward. I might suggest using native packages, especially on mac; something like a DMG or .package.

> Relying on npm seems a bit awkward. 1. npm solves a few problems here. By publishing to npm, the app is instantly available to be downloaded and installed by users. 2. Auto updating. The launcher will automatically check for updates on launch, and download them if any are found so that users are always working with your latest version. I may add support for other CDNs - and originally I just had it so you self host…

conda might be another option. Apparently it does anything (not just python packages).

https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge

Re: JDeploy – Deploy desktop Java apps as native bundles on Mac, Linux, and Windows

#54

Post by cosmotic »

shannah78 wrote: post #7
cosmotic wrote: post #6

This does indeed solve a significant burden. Relying on npm seems a bit awkward. I might suggest using native packages, especially on mac; something like a DMG or .package.

> Relying on npm seems a bit awkward. 1. npm solves a few problems here. By publishing to npm, the app is instantly available to be downloaded and installed by users. 2. Auto updating. The launcher will automatically check for updates on launch, and download them if any are found so that users are always working with your latest version. I may add support for other CDNs - and originally I just had it so you self host…

I presume jdeploy is using its own code-signing to bootstrap the download and installation of other apps. Why not bootstrap a pkg?

Re: JDeploy – Deploy desktop Java apps as native bundles on Mac, Linux, and Windows

#56

Post by seinecle »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #52
shannah78 wrote: post #2

This is a passion project of mine to make it easier to deploy Java desktop apps. I'm very happy with the result, as IMO, the process is orders of magnitudes simpler than what we had before. Some features include: - Native installers for Mac, Windows, and Linux - Build native bundles for all platforms from any platform (e.g. You don't need Mac to make a Mac app. You don't need Windows to make a Windows app, etc..) - A…

> Auto updates. Your users automatically get the latest version on each launch How do you handle this? Are there hooks so that desktop apps can know to migrate state that's on disk?

I'd be curious about this one, too. This lib is great, maybe that it plays a role? -> update4J by mordechaim

Re: JDeploy – Deploy desktop Java apps as native bundles on Mac, Linux, and Windows

#57

Post by seinecle »

shannah78 wrote: post #7
cosmotic wrote: post #6

This does indeed solve a significant burden. Relying on npm seems a bit awkward. I might suggest using native packages, especially on mac; something like a DMG or .package.

> Relying on npm seems a bit awkward. 1. npm solves a few problems here. By publishing to npm, the app is instantly available to be downloaded and installed by users. 2. Auto updating. The launcher will automatically check for updates on launch, and download them if any are found so that users are always working with your latest version. I may add support for other CDNs - and originally I just had it so you self host…

I had tried uploaded dmg to github (free hosting) and using github actions for the signing and notarization. Plus update4j for the automatic updates. All worked fine except for the notarization, never cracked this one.

Re: JDeploy – Deploy desktop Java apps as native bundles on Mac, Linux, and Windows

#58

Post by seinecle »

vips7L wrote: post #11
geokon wrote: post #8

I don't really understand what this is offering. Maybe someone could explain.. Can't you already do this with jpackage or graalvm to create native bundles? At least with jpackage you already get an installer, versioning and upgradeability. I haven't tried graalvm'd native compiler but it should be possible as well.

I don't remember seeing auto update in jpackage.

It must be handled differently, maybe with update4j

Re: JDeploy – Deploy desktop Java apps as native bundles on Mac, Linux, and Windows

#59

Post by Folcon »

shannah78 wrote: post #2

This is a passion project of mine to make it easier to deploy Java desktop apps. I'm very happy with the result, as IMO, the process is orders of magnitudes simpler than what we had before. Some features include: - Native installers for Mac, Windows, and Linux - Build native bundles for all platforms from any platform (e.g. You don't need Mac to make a Mac app. You don't need Windows to make a Windows app, etc..) - A…

As someone who's had to recently setup jpackage for one of my side projects, which took forever and a day and I'm still not happy with the result. I'm very interested.

Just glancing at the site, it really looks like this is something you put a bunch of effort into. I'll definitely check this out! So thanks.

Re: JDeploy – Deploy desktop Java apps as native bundles on Mac, Linux, and Windows

#60

Post by Folcon »

shannah78 wrote: post #49
fire wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a horse in this race, but being able to specify a generic target and then having a documented manifest format sounds nice to me? Then you'd be able to do the ol' "specify base url" and as long as that host answers appropriately it should Just Work ( also doesn't stop you from then having npm configured as the default ); source freedom without blowing up configuration complexity Publishing on the other ha…

> specify a generic target and then having a documented manifest format sounds nice to me? It worked this way in an earlier iteration. I just wanted to make it simpler. I'll probably circle back and re-enable some of the more custom setups. It does allow to you generate the apps and installers locally, but they are still "connected" to the cloud (NPM) for downloading the actual jar files and performing updates.

Would itch.io be a possibility? There are separate channels where updates are pushed, so you should be able to get a latest version per channel and go from there.
Post reply on HN