How to create an installer that installs a JVM at a pre-defined location

[ravikumarj]

Hello.

I am new to InstallAnywhere. It is only a day or two since I am trying to use it!

Well I want to create an installer that takes a location as an input (possibly thru command line arguments or properties file). And at this location, my installer should install a JVM of my choice. I have the following constraints imposed though...

1. No user interaction is required
2. Installer should be able to show a progress to the user
3. Installer needed only on windows platform (XP, 2000 and Vista)

I understand that I can include the JVM of my choice in the VM to bundle option (Build stage).

A. I am not able to understand how to give the location as an input to the installer...
B. I do not understand how is it possible to install only the VM without any other product!

Can someone please help me out on this.

Thank you.

[pv7721]

It's not very clear what you're trying to achieve: why do you want to install only the VM? There are ready-made installers for JVM!

You also say that you want no interaction whatsoever... but you need a location to be given by the end user...

You see, the JVM can be built into the installer, and installed, but it is supposed to be a private JVM, to be used by the installer and the installed application!

And finally, if you want to target Windows platforms only, InstallShield is a better choice!

[ravikumarj]

The reason why I want to install only the VM is, we need to be able to upgrade the VM on the clients' machine (only for my application). My application uses a private VM and I want to be able to upgrade it to a newer one.

Further, as I said, I do not want user input. I would want to install the new version of VM into my application's private JRE folder.

Although I am targetting at windows now, this may be used on different platform further on...

As of now I am able to do this, but not to the full extent. I used a USER_MAGIC_FOLDER to configure a the directory where I need to install my VM. I am left only with one small problem. The directory strucutre should be like this:

MyApplication
|
+-JRE
| |
| +-bin
| |
| +-lib

But due to the usage of VM pack as per IA format (vm.properties and vm.zip inside a .vm - compressed folder), the directory structure that is now turning out is as follows:

MyApplication
|
+-JRE
| |
| +-vm
| | |
| | +-bin
| | |
| | +-lib

You can see that there is an additional folder 'vm' in this hierarchy. Is there a chance of its' elimination? If yes, how can it be done?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thank you.

[pv7721]

Please see my post in this thread: http://community.macrovision.com/showthread.php?t=180186&page=2&highlight=kb+vm There you've got a link to the KB article that explains how to create a custom VM pack. Normally, there is no reason to have the vm folder created, unless you missed something in your steps (like where exactly were you placed in the folder tree when you issued the archiving command).

[ravikumarj]

Thanks a lot, PV.

I dont remember missing out any steps. I re-tried today and faced the same problem several times (despite following the steps as listed in the KB). However, in my last attempt it worked out well!

Am still not able to identify any problem though!

Well, things are in a good shape now. Thanks a lot for your help!

By the way, do people use any zipping tool like WinZip or WinRar, or is the windows supplied compressor used...? (I did with WinRAR)