Installer/Packager for a Java Application for Ubuntu and Suse

How to add my application to quick launch Ubuntu

create a simple .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/

vim ~/.local/share/applications/application_name.desktop

add these entries to file

[Desktop Entry]

Name= your application name

Comment=

Exec=java -jar program.jar

Icon=/path/to/icon

Terminal=false

Type=Application

StartupNotify=true

you will need to log off and back in for the change to take effect.

Packaging to use to deploy cross-platform?

I have a client that uses IzPack to create a single installer (it's Java-based) that installs their app on Windows, OS X and Linux.

http://izpack.org/

What are the Common Practices for Java Development on Linux?

Q> Where do you install your JDK from?

A> I never bother with other JDKs coming from outside Sun/Oracle mainly because our product is only certified to work with Sun/Oracle JRE. On my desktop, I run Kubuntu, but I never use apt-get for this but always download them manually. Reasons:

distro maintainers rarely rush to upgrade packages, as their primary concern is to make dependant apps (such as OpenOffice) work. If JDK changes from 1.6.0_20 to 1.6.0_21, they simply don't care. I might do because a newer patch might have an important bugfix or I simply want to try if my app still passes all the unit tests.
it might be a nightmare to retain old JDK versions. We still support older versions of our product and if I upgrade to a newer Kubuntu, I don't have guarantees that some ancient JDK will still be available as a package.
I am not sure some distros even support multiple existence of JDKs on the same machine.

My preference is to keep all JDKs/JREs in /opt and make a symlink to the newest one or the one I need most. I simply don't see why installing JDK manually is a problem.

I also set the PATH to the newest JDK/JRE.

Same thing (and similar arguments) apply to Ant and Maven.

Q> Where do you install Eclipse?

A> I use IntelliJ but the same applies. I store IDE in my home folder. This allows me to have different versions of it, update them without needing sudo, etc. I could as well install it in /opt but I guess I got this habit when I was downloading and testing newest IntelliJ IDEA EAP every week so I can quickly delete the older versions and do not pollute /opt. Finally, other programs might require Ant/Maven/JDK but it's only me who uses IntelliJ hence the different approach.

Q> Where do you put your Jetty/Tomcat?

A> I have a separate folder tomcats under /home where I have ~10 different Tomcat instances. Each of Tomcats is used for a different version of my app (we bundle Tomcat with our app). This is necessary because one deployment of our app can have different Tomcat settings (or even version) than another.

Q> What are some of the differences between the way you setup development versus production

A> It very much depends on your app. For example, we need some partitions to have lower access latencies but having less space (e.g. gigabytes for Lucene indexes) VS others which can have higher latencies but require more space (e.g. terabytes for content repositories). We, however, design our app so that all these different aspects can reside on different partitions which are configurable. Some partitions need to have special limitations (e.g. file upload) so this doesn't overflow other partitions. There is no simple one-for-all answer to this question, but obviously most of these concerns don't matter that much for a development environment.

Installation of java in LINUX

First and foremost make sure the file is not the webpage, the Linux jre6u16 is roughly 19mb. The ampersand (&) in the filename as already stated, tells the OS to run the process in the background. Rename the file to something simpler using mv and put the filename in quotes:

mv "jre-6u16-linux-i586-rpm.bin?e=1255431454245&h=f50f4cda5641e55f8e49f217e854faca%2F&filename=jre-6u16-linux-i586-rpm.bin" jre-6u16-linux-i586-rpm.bin

then allow execute permissions:

chmod a+x jre-6u16-linux-i586-rpm.bin

then we can install it:

./jre-6u16-linux-i586-rpm.bin

Run a Java Application as a Service on Linux

I wrote another simple wrapper here:

#!/bin/sh
SERVICE_NAME=MyService
PATH_TO_JAR=/usr/local/MyProject/MyJar.jar
PID_PATH_NAME=/tmp/MyService-pid
case $1 in
    start)
        echo "Starting $SERVICE_NAME ..."
        if [ ! -f $PID_PATH_NAME ]; then
            nohup java -jar $PATH_TO_JAR /tmp 2>> /dev/null >> /dev/null &
            echo $! > $PID_PATH_NAME
            echo "$SERVICE_NAME started ..."
        else
            echo "$SERVICE_NAME is already running ..."
        fi
    ;;
    stop)
        if [ -f $PID_PATH_NAME ]; then
            PID=$(cat $PID_PATH_NAME);
            echo "$SERVICE_NAME stoping ..."
            kill $PID;
            echo "$SERVICE_NAME stopped ..."
            rm $PID_PATH_NAME
        else
            echo "$SERVICE_NAME is not running ..."
        fi
    ;;
    restart)
        if [ -f $PID_PATH_NAME ]; then
            PID=$(cat $PID_PATH_NAME);
            echo "$SERVICE_NAME stopping ...";
            kill $PID;
            echo "$SERVICE_NAME stopped ...";
            rm $PID_PATH_NAME
            echo "$SERVICE_NAME starting ..."
            nohup java -jar $PATH_TO_JAR /tmp 2>> /dev/null >> /dev/null &
            echo $! > $PID_PATH_NAME
            echo "$SERVICE_NAME started ..."
        else
            echo "$SERVICE_NAME is not running ..."
        fi
    ;;
esac

You can follow a full tutorial for init.d here and for systemd (ubuntu 16+) here

If you need the output log replace the 2

nohup java -jar $PATH_TO_JAR /tmp 2>> /dev/null >> /dev/null &

lines for

nohup java -jar $PATH_TO_JAR >> myService.out 2>&1&

rJava won't install on openSUSE 13.2

Turns out the problem was missing libicu-devel package. Installing it fixed the problem.