Compile Java to Exe (for Free)
Java is a great language. As any good Java developer knows it has a wealth of APIs, works well on a variety of platforms and has a huge developer base and support network but it has been dogged its entire life with one major problem - deployment.
Writing the app code in Java is only half the battle when it comes to producing a usable app in Java. Sun and now Oracle simply don't provide anything for you to get your Java app out to your customers or users. In the 90s the concept that everyone might have a JRE installed so you could just give them a JAR file might have seemed reasonable, today given applet security issues and the the lack of user friendliness of the Java installer and updater it is simply not viable.
Developers that need to deploy their app today need to turn their Java app into a native executable - an exe. There are mainly a couple of options available for this; build or buy.
Building your own native executables using OS-specific installers may seem like a reasonable idea until you actually try to do it and quickly discover that you need to write a ton of native code for supplementary apps, figure out your own solutions for keeping the download size down and setting up a JRE, learn multiple installer scripting languages and thats before you even try to automate the whole mess.
The other option is to buy an existing installer like Install4J, JExpress, or use an ahead of time compiler like Excelsior JET. The problem with these solutions is that they are incredibly expensive. A single developer license can cost upwards of $4000 in just the first year.
In 2012 though, two developers that were tired of the existing lack of choice decided to create a multi platform native app builder that supported all the top end features like auto updating, web deployment, auto converted icons, customisable installation, online and offline apps, massive JRE compression and even cross platform multi platform code signing. Best of all they decided JWrapper should be:
Writing the app code in Java is only half the battle when it comes to producing a usable app in Java. Sun and now Oracle simply don't provide anything for you to get your Java app out to your customers or users. In the 90s the concept that everyone might have a JRE installed so you could just give them a JAR file might have seemed reasonable, today given applet security issues and the the lack of user friendliness of the Java installer and updater it is simply not viable.
Developers that need to deploy their app today need to turn their Java app into a native executable - an exe. There are mainly a couple of options available for this; build or buy.
Building your own native executables using OS-specific installers may seem like a reasonable idea until you actually try to do it and quickly discover that you need to write a ton of native code for supplementary apps, figure out your own solutions for keeping the download size down and setting up a JRE, learn multiple installer scripting languages and thats before you even try to automate the whole mess.
The other option is to buy an existing installer like Install4J, JExpress, or use an ahead of time compiler like Excelsior JET. The problem with these solutions is that they are incredibly expensive. A single developer license can cost upwards of $4000 in just the first year.
In 2012 though, two developers that were tired of the existing lack of choice decided to create a multi platform native app builder that supported all the top end features like auto updating, web deployment, auto converted icons, customisable installation, online and offline apps, massive JRE compression and even cross platform multi platform code signing. Best of all they decided JWrapper should be:
FREE
Don't believe it? Check out our downloads to try it out and start building your own native apps in Java today.
