[Devtools] WixGen - Java API for WiX MSI installers using JAXB

[Alex Kashchenko]

Hi devtools developers,

I've been working on a MSI installer for OpenJDK (recently posted 
details about OpenJDK on windows to internal devtools list). For that 
installer I created a WixGen utility (github project link [1]) that 
generates .wxs XML descriptors for WiX.

WiX is an open-source project from Outercurve Foundation [1], it is a 
de-facto standard for MSI installers. It is written in C++ and C#, so it 
doesn't have a direct Java API. Installer's "input descriptor" should be 
written in XML format and then processed by WiX tools to generate a MSI.

Using WiX' XSD-schema [3] we can generate [4] JAXB classes [5] from that 
schema that effectively gives us a Java API for generating XML 
descriptors. JAXB-generated API is by no means elegant (example [6]), 
but quite flexible - all WiX features can be used though it.

wixgen.jar utility (created on top of JAXB API) itself is not of much 
interest - it is basically a limited (albeit fine-tuned) NIH version of 
the WiX' heat utility [7]. But JAXB classes IMO may be useful for 
developing additional tooling for creating MSI installers.

For example Maven plugin can be developed to build MSI installers for 
Java applications. And more features can be packed into such plugin: for 
example some time ago I was doing a Maven plugin [8] for installers 
(non-MSI) to install Java apps as Windows Services using ProcRun/PrunSrv 
[9] tools. The same Windows Services support can be done with WiX. And 
as AFAIK main author of ProcRun/PrunSrv works for RH - such plugin can 
be supported quite well.

Another example is a possible Eclipse plugin for WiX. VisualStudio has 
one [10], probably something similar can be developed for Eclipse. And 
while WiX is Windows-only, there exists a msitools project [11] in 
Fedora that supports a subset of WiX' XSD-schema.

Currently there are no plans for the further development of WixGen, as 
it currently covers required features for OpenJDK installer (link to MSI 
[12] - as an example generated by WixGen). But if there will be some 
interest in creating additional tooling for MSI installers - I can 
assist in such efforts.


[1] http://www.outercurve.org/
[2] https://github.com/akashche/wixgen
[3] 
https://github.com/akashche/wixgen/blob/c77cf791399b6b0a9304f4deec6b7aa14b80b280/wixgen-jaxb/src/main/resources/com/redhat/akashche/wixgen/jaxb/wix.xsd
[4] 
https://github.com/akashche/wixgen/blob/c77cf791399b6b0a9304f4deec6b7aa14b80b280/wixgen-jaxb/pom.xml#L37
[5] http://akashche.github.io/wixgen/wixgen-jaxb/apidocs/
[6] 
https://github.com/akashche/wixgen/blob/19bd1a0b7f24df5034a868f37eeff17c5a61d0df/wixgen-dir/src/main/java/com/redhat/akashche/wixgen/dir/DirectoryGenerator.java#L48
[7] http://wixtoolset.org/documentation/manual/v3/overview/heat.html
[8] https://github.com/alexkasko/windows-service-installer
[9] http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-daemon/procrun.html
[10] 
https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/b6868002-9770-4479-80a7-259de34df527
[11] https://wiki.gnome.org/msitools
[12] 
https://github.com/ojdkbuild/ojdkbuild/releases/download/1.8.0.91-3/java-1.8.0-openjdk-1.8.0.91-3.b14.windows.x86_64.msi

-- 
-Alex