I Think I’m Starting to See a Pattern Here…
Published at 23:32 on 1 May 2020
I’m trying to package a Java program I wrote so it makes a nice, professional-looking “clickable” app, complete with a custom icon.
First up was the Mac. The Oracle-furnished packaging tools were buggy and did not exactly work as documented, but I finally managed to make a (crappy) package from them.
Then came Linux. At first I was at a loss as to what to do, then I decided to crib the package bundler that the jEdit build files used. It was a huge struggle, because it was your typical open-source project, almost completely undocumented. Eventually I managed to get it to limp along to completion and make a (nonworking) Debian package.
A day of struggle followed, trying to make the nonworking package work. Eventually I gave up on the bundler and decided to make a Debian package completely from scratch. That was surprisingly easy compared to the crap software I had been fighting with.
Then back to the Mac. Would the bundler that the jEdit team used do any better a job than the stock one shipped with the JDK? No, it would not. So I looked into what made a Mac application bundle tick, and it wasn’t that complex. The biggest hurdles were (a) finding the magic keyword to search on (“bundle” in this case), and creating an Info.plist file (doable once I located the documentation for them).
So I built that one totally from scratch, too. So now I’m two for two at it being less work to “re-invent the wheel” than it is to use an existing, off-the-shelf solution.
Next up: Windows. Just for yucks, I’ll give Launch4j a whirl, though based on my recent experiences, I don’t expect it to work, and I’m not planning on investing much time in trying to make it work, either. Who knows, maybe I’ll get pleasantly surprised. (Then again, probably not.)
Update: Well, I’ll be. Launch4j actually proved to be a time-saver. The most obnoxious thing about it is a bizarre insistence on four-part version numbers, but it turns out that’s a Windows thing (and it is documented), so it’s not the Launch4j team’s fault.