Improve ami packaging

[remkop]

Investigate the jpackage tool that is included in Java 14.

From the documentation:

The jpackage tool packages a Java application into a platform-specific package that includes all of the necessary dependencies. The application may be provided as a collection of ordinary JAR files or as a collection of modules. The supported platform-specific package formats are:

• Linux: deb and rpm
• macOS: pkg and dmg
• Windows: msi and exe

It may be possible to add this to the Maven build, with plugins like jlink-jpackager-maven-plugin.

[petermr]

That sounds great.

I have no problems in jumping to Java14. We have no production code we have to worry about. And this is a great way of learning.

BTW @remkop and @Gilad Denneboom feel free to add Java8-14 idioms where they make sense. I'll try to learn. One area that is likely to be useful is optional because unexpected null s are very common .

On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 3:46 AM Remko Popma notifications@github.com wrote:

Investigate the jpackage tool that is included https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/343 in Java 14.

From the documentation:

The jpackage tool packages a Java application into a platform-specific package that includes all of the necessary dependencies. The application may be provided as a collection of ordinary JAR files or as a collection of modules. The supported platform-specific package formats are:

• Linux: deb and rpm
• macOS: pkg and dmg
• Windows: msi and exe

It may be possible to add this to the Maven build, with plugins like jlink-jpackager-maven-plugin https://github.com/agilhard-oss/jlink-jpackager-maven-plugin.

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-- Peter Murray-Rust Founder ContentMine.org and Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics Dept. Of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, CB2 1EW, UK

[remkop]

If NPE's are a common problem, then just running the program on Java 14 will help, since they introduced "helpful NullPointerExceptions" that look something like this

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException: 
        Cannot assign field "i" because "a" is null
    at Prog.main(Prog.java:5)

instead of the "old" way, which looked like this:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
    at Prog.main(Prog.java:5)

[petermr]

Great! we'll move to Java14. I'll also gradually try to clean up tests but it's a long process.

On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 10:35 AM Remko Popma notifications@github.com wrote:

If NPE's are a common problem, then just running the program on Java 14 will help, since they introduced "helpful NullPointerExceptions https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/358" that look something like this

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot assign field "i" because "a" is null at Prog.main(Prog.java:5)

instead of the "old" way, which looked like this:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at Prog.main(Prog.java:5)

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/petermr/ami3/issues/17#issuecomment-606511228, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAFTCS6VTMFDZ3XVX43WJ7DRKG2OXANCNFSM4LXFSSWQ .

-- Peter Murray-Rust Founder ContentMine.org and Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics Dept. Of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, CB2 1EW, UK

[remkop]

Closing, since with the work on #24 and #51 we now have a publishing pipeline that results in a zip/bz2 archive with launcher scripts and required jars. Artifacts are hosted by GitHub Packages: https://github.com/petermr/ami3/packages/

The equivalent jpackage solution would include a (minimized) version of the JRE. This would add another 30-40MB to the download, but would allow users to run ami without installing Java.

For our current purposes, our current solution is sufficient.