Are you having trouble installing JAmiga 1.2?

From reports on the support forum on amigans.net, JosDuchIt reported some troubles installing and running JAmiga. The culprit was an innocent space in the name of the driver where JAmiga was installed.

I'm ashamed to say that my installation script didn't support spaces in partition or drawer of installation path. I myself have had spaces in my partition names, f.i. "AmigaOS 4:", so its a bit silly i didn't catch this. I'm assuming other's have had similar problems, but only JosDuchIt had the courage, and sense to report it!

Given the Amiga community's size, its really crucial for developers to get some sort of user feedback. I'm actually pretty spoiled with a rather large buzz, all things considering. So, its not so much for JAmiga's users, but more for the sake of all the other program on os4depot and elsewhere: please, if you download something and it doesn't work - report it. Most, if not all, developers want user feedback, because they put a great deal of effort into just uploading stuff to os4depot.

I'm really throwing bricks in my own glass house, but its one of my new years resolutions: to give more feedback for programs I regularly use.

Updated installer available

Anyway, the error with the installer has now been fixed, and the JAmiga 1.2 archive on os4depot should be able to install nicely - even with spaces. Remember to AmiUpdate after installation!

Some background info

I thought I'd share some of my installations script behavior. It is in most regards a pretty normal install script. Howver, the Java classes (i.e. all the class files building up the Java SE standard), are in-fact bundled in the JAmiga archive as lha archives. The entire Java SE standard consist of roughly 3700 classes, and in essence the same amount of files. So I wanted to lessen the initial unpacking to a minimum, and leave the most unpacking to the install script. Therefor UnArc handles the unpacking during installation. And I missed a pair of quotes surrounding the destination drawer, hence the space issue.

Other things I've included in the install script are the preview and choice of icons. For this I use Multiview with its companioning ARexx port to close the preview.

In order to open the DefIcons tutorial, I use the AmigaOS 4 standard program "URLOpen". One future enhancement I'm thinking of is to automatically launch AmiUpdate when the installation has been performed, so any new updates have a better chance of being noticed and installed.

And these are some of my favorite things with version 4 of AmigaOS. As a developer I can actually rely on a few things being installed by default. I don't need to weigh down my archive with support files. Now, I wasn't much of a developer in the 3.x era, but I remember installing stuff often required the installer to supply the lha unarchiver and such. Furthermore, with the power of ARexx, a lot of stuff can be done from scripts, which I'm just realizing writing a few AmigaGuides for JAmiga.

Anyhow, I should get back to writing and releasing my Twitter application. Not because its ground breaking or earth shattering in any way, its only because it is a great example of what can be done with JAmiga today, using third party JAR files.

Tata!