I want to make a portable javafx application with JRE inside for Windows systems. I can make a jar and I aware about javapackage tool, but I can't find a simple way to create a portable application and wrap it in exe.
You could use Inno Setup for it, it's really simple. And even integrated if you are under Eclipse
I found all the informations about how to use it here
http://code.makery.ch/library/javafx-8-tutorial/part7/
Basically, you download it from http://www.jrsoftware.org/isdl.php and install it. Then you just need to set its path in your environment variables so that eclipse knows how to run it
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I would like to deploy for the first time my first app made with PyQt5. I found pyqtdeploy (link) to be probably what I need to do this for Windows and other platforms.
Anyway, I am following this tutorial, but, as I am completely new to deploying applications, I am not sure on one thing: do I need to download Qt for the target specific platform I need to deploy my app to? If so, am I supposed to use qmake from that Qt installation against the result of pyqtdeploy? For example: if I want to deploy to Windows, do I have to download Qt from here (and which version???)?
From the same tutorial page, this is not so clear, maybe it's obvious, but as I am a newbie in this, not for me.
No you don't need to download Qt.
When building your 'sysroot.toml' file, pyqtdeploy will download qt-everywhere-src and builds it from source.
In the built sysroot directory you can find qmake executable in "...\Qt\bin" (qmake.exe) depends on where your project files (sysroot.toml file) are.
For example if your host machine is Windows and C:\Users\username\Desktop\My_PyQtDeploy_Proj is your project folder which contains sysroot.toml, after building sysroot you can find qmake in "C:\Users\username\Desktop\My_PyQtDeploy_Proj\sysroot-win-64\Qt\bin\qmake.exe"
I was successfully able to compile and run my Qt application. However, when I move the .exe file outside its original path, I found out that I have to manually copy the Qt DLLs (e.g. mingw10.dll, qtcore4.dll). Is there any dynamic way to link these libraries with my application?
I think you mean you want to "statically" link these libraries with your application.
Basically this means that everything will be rolled inside your exe, and you will have no need of those dlls anymore.
There are advantages to to static linking, but there are also disadvantages as well. You should be absolutely sure that this is what you want to do before you go this way.
Check out this link which explains the difference in depth Dynamic Linking vs Static Linking
As for your specific issue, if you are sure you want to use static linking you will have to change your Qt setup to be built statically. By default the Qt distribution is setup to use dynamic linking. There is a handy guide for that here.
Basically when you setup the build you have to run "configure -static" to change all the project settings to use static linking instead of dynamic linking. And then build Qt over again.
You should also verify your Qt license. If you are using the Qt LGPL license and you want to to link statically you will have to include all your object files (.o and .obj) as Mihai Limbășan wisely explained in his comment. If you have bought and paid for Qt, then you have no problem.
If the DLLs are on the PATH for the application, then they will be found and work. So, you could add where your Qt binaries/dlls are into the %PATH% environment variable. If you're going to create an installer for your application, you'll need to either package these libraries in so they're in the bin directory - or you'll have to expect every user to install and possibly compile Qt themselves (hint: go with the first option. :) )
I want to created a JAR file and I want to run it on a client machine.So, I have a couple of questions:
How can I convert the JAR file to an EXE file?
How can I encrypt the JAR file's contents? The jar file could be extracted with WinRAR and the classes could be decompiled with any Java decompiler.
How can I create an installer? My clients doesn't have any JVM and I don't want to ship JDK or JRE along, because they have big size.
See this link: Java to Exe. It also explains what valid reasons are to do this, and when you should not.
You can't really encrypt binaries as the machine has to understand them. That said, an optimized executable is very difficult to decompile, while plain class files are ease.
If you have an exe there are installers enough.
JSmooth is a application which will wrap your Jar in an exe
it also allows you to check if the correct version of JRE is available on the system you're deploying to
http://jsmooth.sourceforge.net/
As for 1): I guess you can not. There may be tools out there, but you cannot do that with standard tools shipped with JDK, as it would destroy platform independance. (See other answers providing links to such 3rd party tools)
As for 3): Use InnoSetup to create the installer. Include JRE within setup and let InnoSetup install it on the fly.
You can't prevent decompilation. The best you can do is make it harder or more time-consuming to do so. As an answer to your question though, I believe you can use gcj to compile Java into EXEs.
May be Excelsior JET will satisfy your needs.) IMHO very mature product.
1) I have recently tried the program jarToExe and like it.
Some features are:
free basic version or very cheap ($30) for 'enterprise'
ability to have windows task manager list your app's name instead of the default java.exe
extra obfuscation
runtime check that java is installed
2) You can make it harder to reverse engineer using proguard or other obfuscator
3) nsis is a very powerful, free scripting language to create windows installers. Good documentation on the site wiki and support on stack overflow as well.
Launch4j worked for me while some tools hadn't been working. It also have a good guide here.
Hope this help!
We use a 7zip SFX install launcher. This is an open source simple tool. It will package your jar, a version of jre so it's not mandatory for the installing systems to have jre installed and a self extracting version of 7zip. Here is a tutorial which explains how to bundle and GitHub link
The project is not maintained but works perfectly(tested until Java 1.8)
1) To create the exe, you can use Launch4j
2) As I have seen, you cannot encrypt the jar contents. I'm not sure though.
3) To create the installer you can use the exe you just created and use InnoSetup to create the files. You have to embed the jre inside the installer and also any other libraries and extra files that may need in the runtime. When embedding the jre, the setup gets large and if you want to avoid that, you can ask the clients to install java in the machines. That way, you wont need to ship with the jre.
Whats the best way to deploy a QT app? I've read the documentation hosted at trolltech but is it better to link with a static library or the dynamic libraries and have the user install the framework? I don't really want anyone using my app to have to download a 160mb framework just to run a simple gui frontend.
On OS X it's a good way to do a dynamic build and post-process the resulting ".app" with the macdeployqt tool which comes with Qt starting with 4.5.
This will copy the Qt frameworks used by your application into the application bundle, which results in a larger package than building a static version of your application.
Here is what you can do to make sure you get the smallest file size possibly in a dynamic build:
First off, make sure you only include the stuff you need (in the project.pro file's QT += core gui network xml lines).
Open the application bundle and remove any unneeded "Qt Plugins" from the bundle. macdeployqt automatically compies all the Qt plugins in there, which can be kind of bulky.
Make sure you are building your application in release mode. Otherwise your application might be linked against the debug libraries of the Qt4 framework, and they are really big (for instance, well over 90 MB for the debug library vs. 16 MB of a release variant without debugging symbols). This might be what happened in your case.
If you have a large application binary, you can use UPX to compress your executable file by 40-50%.
Other than that, you should use compressed disk images to deploy your application.
One of my projects uses QtGui, QtNetwork, QtCore and QtXml and the resulting bundle is about 16 MB in size.
Hope that helps.
Unfortunately you will have to include the Qt libraries you need into your own bundle, as you cannot expect your users to have Qt installed on Mac (whereas on Linux packaging systems allow you to require at least a given version of Qt.
There is a nice tool to help you with that, which is called macdeployqt. You just need to invoke it on your bundle application and it will pack the required libraries, changing the linkage of your binary to refer to them. Without it, making bundles for Mac is a real pain (it still is, but considerably less though).
http://doc.trolltech.com/4.6/deployment-mac.html#the-mac-deployment-tool
Afterwards, you can make a .dmg image as you would do with any other app. There is an option in macdeployqt that builds a basic one.
On Linux, it's better to rely on the OS's copy of Qt, as it's almost certainly installed - for OS X, almost all apps use a statically compiled library.
Is there a quick, straightforward way to make a Qt application into an executable? I attempted to follow the instructions at http://doc.qt.digia.com/4.1/deployment-windows.html but have been unsuccesfull thus far; I'm unable to Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!
I always use CMake to build Qt projects, it's easy, free and cross platform. Guide : Compiling Qt4 apps with CMake. CMake also come with CPack to easly make installer for Windows, Mac and Linux.
I agree with chmod700 about the Qt Creator suggestion, it's not my favorite IDE but it's still really nice and easy.
Do you mean an installer package? I assume you are able to compile, link, and run your app and you mean how do you package it up for others.
http://installbuilder.bitrock.com/ <-- special handling of Qt based projects but costs $
http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php <-- my personal favorite and it's free (can be rough to learn advanced features though)
Though if you mean how do you build your app, you may want to try the new Qt Creator (http://www.qtsoftware.com/products/appdev/developer-tools/developer-tools#qt-tools-at-a) which will setup build targets for you and really makes desktop Qt dev a snap. Also if you're still using 4.1, you can now use 4.5 under the LGPL on all platforms making it almost a no-brainer to upgrade.
I'm not sure if I understand your problem. Assuming you're using MinGW, it's really easy and quite straightforward:
get the Qt sources and unpack them to some folder (f.e. c:\Qt\4.5.0-static)
install MinGW. Make sure the MinGW executable folder is in the %PATH% variable.
open a cmd windows, go to the Qt sources and run configure -static. You can add other config options if you like to, but usually you don't need that.
when building Qt finished, go to your application sources, open a cmd window and run the qmake of your built Qt installation -- i.e. c:\Qt\4.5.0-static\bin\qmake in the example given above.
run make
you get a statically linked binary in the end (you might want to check it with Dependency Walker).
Doing the same using Visual Studio is pretty similar.
Or do you want to build dynamically and create an installer package?