I installed glassfish on my pc yesterday. Glassfish is a shiny new j2ee server; I am evaluating it as a replacement for tomcat 5.0.30, which is dying a few times a day in one installation I monitor. The glassfish installation process was beautiful: an executable jar did it all, and got it right the second time. (I had to configure my path to get to a JDK first, not a JRE.) Next I downloaded a recent Open Laszlo servlet war, dropped it into glassfish's auto_deploy directory, then, poof, my servlet was installed. (Anybody want more detailed instructions on deploying Open Laszlo to glassfish? Comment here.)
That same day, one of the hardcore Open Laszlo developers mentioned the emotional fortitude necessary to create a cygwin build and development environment; earlier that I day, I completely blew up at two very skillful people creating a new development environment on a mac. Earlier this week, my team was temporarily unable to create Windows installers for Open Laszlo because of a hardware failure on the one PC that we use to build NSIS installers.
The problem here is not the operating systems, the source code, the hardware, nor (least of all!) my co-workers. The problem is the Open Laszlo build process, for which I am culpable, and the Open Laszlo install process, which has been on my plate to improve for months now.
My goal: make it possible to install an Open Laszlo server using a pure-Java installer which is almost entirely identical for windows, mac, and linux. And: make it possible to create an Open Laszlo/subversion build environment in less than an hour (after getting all the binaries), without suffering, without hand-editing a bashrc, and without worrying about forward-slash vs backward slash.