Glast GUI installer

This is a GUI front-end to Navid's installer. The installed should now work on Windows, Linux or MacOSX. Unlike the command line installer it does not require direct access to MySQL and thus should work even if the MySQL port is blocked at your local firewall.

Requirements

You need to have Java installed prior to using the installer. If you are a VRVS user you should already have Java installed, if not you can download Java from java.com.

Linux users may need to configure their browser to open .jnlp files with the javaws application (installed as part of Java).

Launch the Installer

To launch the installer just click on the link below

Launch Installer Now!

Screenshots

In case it doesn't work for you, this is what it should look like.

Implementation Notes

The installer does not talk directly to the database, instead it gets its info from a web server, where a simple servlet queries the database and returns results as plain text to the installer. This demo illustrates how the web interface works. The web interface isolates the client from the database details, and thus only the single web servlet needs to be updated if the database organization changes (the servlet could also easily be replaced by a cgi-bin script if this was simpler to maintain). Of course the GUI may need to be updated to support additional features, but this should also be easy to do.