Julien Ponge has just announced the availability of an improved version of the GlassFish installer powered by the shinny new 3.1.1 release of IzPack.

Since the previous release, the installer has gained support for Solaris (x86 and SPARC) and more flexibility in domain creation (domain name, port, password, etc..). It also optionally starts the domain on your behalf and points you to the admin console. You can chose between a MacOS, Windows or "universal" installer.

It seems that Julien has been getting a fair amount of download without even being listed on the GlassFish homepage as a download option. Maybe we should change the later.

Good news from Julien: he has a new version of IzPack for GlassFish that has support for Solaris, can adjust domain and cluster creation and can open the admin console for you. Check it out and give feedback; it looks very good. Check Julien's Announcement or go directly to the Installer JAR file.

Julien Ponge had promised to release his IzPack-powered GlassFish installer soon after v2ur1 was released. It is now available. Instructions and download location HERE. This is a single-archive download for three platforms: Linux, Mac, and Windows. The installer for Solaris should come later. Let us and Julien know what you think - both how it compares to the existing install experience as well as what could be improved in Julien's installer.

There's been some recent activity around the GlassFish install experience lately and that's a good thing (tm). Julien Ponge, GlassFish Community member and creator of IzPack has announced an IzPack-based GlassFish installer. This is a single jar installer (around 80M) containing everything for Windows, Mac and Linux. Solaris should follow. The jar is created using the "official" GlassFish installer binaries and a Ruby script to compute the platform-specific files and generate the IzPack XML descriptor.

The bits will soon be available as well as "source code of the scripts and IzPack-specific files needed to generate the installer under a liberal MIT-style license". Thanks Julien!

Most GlassFish users are familiar with either the "jar" installer from glassfish.java.net or the Java EE 5 SDK installer. Once GlassFish v2 is released (September 17th is still on), there will also be Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 installers to address enterprise customers needs such as package-based install. This blog from Sathyan explains the differences between the various installers and the implications of choosing one over the others.

These are all different installers for the same GlassFish bits.