JNLP installer for JNode.

I have looked ahead to the same future. It is often a very slow proccess to update a linux distro, because of the high volume the host is serving.

I am in the proccess of developing a component manager that will be able to install plugins for itself. More that that, it can determin what plugins are needed, find them on the network, download them, and install them.

This proccess happens in the course of normal code execution. The only indication of the proccess is a slowdown when the plugin is being downloaded.

The user need not concern himself with the install proccess at all, every thing is done for him, when he needs it. Automatically.

If you would like more details, you can read this discussion.
http://jnode.sourceforge.net/portal/node/view/240

The format of a service for the ServiceManager requires that there be a path to an implementation of Description for every service in a jar file. Description states neccessary services, prefered services, version, provider, and title.
Also every Description implementation is required to have a public no arg constructor. So after examining a service jar, you can just load the Description class and call newInstance().

The ServiceManager does not inspect these values, except to see that they are non-null. It will install a service wether its needs are met or not. The task of managing dependencies is left to another tool.

I was right to say that JNLP suppurts shared resources. A JNLP file can contain also resources that an application must have when it is run. Here is a quote from JNLP specs: "A JNLP file is a component extension if the component-desc element is specified. A component
extension is typically used to factor out a set of resources that are shared between a large set applications."

Also the JNLP specification say : "It is expected that future versions of this specification will introduce new elements and attributes that
would be backwards-compatible with the current DTD. Thus, a JNLP Client should not reject a JNLP file
that has extra attributes or elements. This means that the JNLP Client’s XML parser must not validate the
JNLP XML file against any fixed version of the JNLP DTD."
I think this fraze says it. We can have our own stuff inside. If for updateing the JNode system (the OS) itself we need other tags in JNLP file we can have them.

> don't you think that we could also find a way to install/update
> automatically also jar/zip/tar.gz packages ?

Yes, JNLP. Why spend time inventing another way to install/update packages? JNLP is not restricting jnode users, you will be restricting users by not having it. JNLP isn't a minority subset on the internet (IMO, ofcourse!). It's just not true that there wouldn't be many packages you could install.

Given any non-JNLP package, it isn't too hard to give it a JNLP file, so it could be installed via a JNLP installer. In fact an intelligent installer could probably be made to internally autogenerate a default JNLP file for any package lacking one.

Basically, the problems of writing *an* installer are going to be more or less the same as writing a JNLP installer. Ofcourse, with JNLP some of the work has already be done --- the JNLP spec exists.

I think JNLP knows how to deal with things that you say. I have downloaded the specs and I will read them. To install a software under JNode will always be easy coze you can just copy the files and run the mani class..or that software can come with its own installer. We should have an installer for JNode as a system(for system packages if you want) and as I said we can use it also as a standard app installer for JNode but that doesn't mean that you can't install applications in other way but if one wants to have a nice deployment on JNode he needs to have a JNLP file.