New Installation Method

A new installation model for Java ES components was introduced in Java ES 6. It is still worth mentioning in these Release Notes however because some users may have bypassed version 6 and are upgrading directly from Java ES version 5 or earlier.

Java ES releases prior to version 6 provided a common installer for the core Java ES products. While this common installer had some advantages, especially when performing simple, single-system installations, it also had some disadvantages:

• It required superuser access to run, and gave superuser ownership to installed software.

• It permitted only a single product instance per system.

• It supported only native-package software distributions.

Quite often, one or more of these disadvantages made the task of installing a robust, enterprise-strength deployment of Java ES more complicated or convoluted than necessary. The common installer was therefore retired in Java ES 6 in favor of the installers provided by the individual products in the Java ES base distribution. Because each product installer is tuned to the features and capabilities of the product it installs, the overall installation experience is smoother now than in past releases.