I have a springframework web application that uses JBoss, MySQL and ActiveMQ.
At the moment, I have to install and configure JBoss, MySQL and ActiveMQ and JBoss manually.
What is the best way to package the application so a user can maybe do a one click install (on Linux platform, maybe Windows too?)
I have the same problem. I'm afraid this isn't an answer, but I can't comment yet. I'm writing a java based installer. I'm thinking it might be possible to run some of the installations through the command line, but I haven't gotten terribly far with that. Thanks to apt-get/aptitude, it's possible to do some of that on linux, not sure about windows though.
The "proper" way to do it is to pull down the source or src.rpms (or the equivalent of src.rpms depending on your distro) and repackage them correctly. If you have never messed with packaging linux application then this will probably take you a long time and will yield mediocre results unless you are willing to invest a lot of time.
An easier method is to write a shell script. Copy every shell command you type into a .sh file and run that file as a privileged user. If you edit files manually (with vim, emacs or gedit) instead edit the files with perl, sed, and awk, or just crush the files by curl'ing the modified version from a local webserver or copied from scp.
You can include the commands to install the packages as well as configure them in the script if you like.
As far as ActiveMQ is in question, you can always embed it in your application. Take a look at http://activemq.apache.org/how-do-i-embed-a-broker-inside-a-connection.html for more info