Mailing Lists: Apple Mailing Lists
Image of Mac OS face in stamp
 
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Simulating WebStart on MRJ 2.2

Sorry, my last message accidentally got sent before I finished it.


I'm starting on a major "web enabled" client application project. Our latest
magaement system is operated through a web brower, which needs to launch said
application.

For Windows and OS X, WebStart is the obvious solution. And it provides all
kinds of cool version and JVM control options that will make deployment,
upgrades, and management sweet.

However, our target market is education and we're just not ready to leave the
millions of Macs running OS 8/9 behind.

So, I'd like to find out if anyone has attempted to do approximately what
WebStart does in an MRJ 2.2 environment? What I'm thinking of is a signed
applet that can start (Runtime.exec()?) the client application, ideally
passing it configuration parameters via a document. It would be a huge bonus
if the applet could also download the client application and/or kick off an
installer for it. But a manual install of the client would be acceptable.

Is this something that an applet running in IE or Netscape under OS 8/9 is
capable of doing? Any "gothcha's" or caveats that I should know about?

I recently built a launcher for our JNLP product using the OpenJNLP code
base, to run under MRJ 2.2.5.

OpenJNLP 0.4 does not provide any code signing features, and does not set up
a Security Manager. It's class loader prevents using native methods (in classes
loaded by the class loader), it does not have the MRJToolkit handlers set up to
work as a Web Browser helper app, and it doesn't implement all the JNLP file
keywords.

The version I built works around these things, and adds some things our app needed.
It should not be considered a general JNLP app launcher, but simply a launcher for
our application under Mac OS 9 only (it has Mac-specific code, including JDirect calls
for vetting heap size specifications in the JNLP file). As OpenJNLP is an open source
project, I can post the URL to our implementation:
http://www.elluminate.com/support/download_openjnlp.jsp

there is a link at the bottom of the page for the source code archive. The only source
that is not included is the crypto classes for JAR signature verification.

Again, this code is not suitable for general use, but is probably a good starting point
for another launcher, closer to a commercial product than OpenJNLP 0.4.

If anything will be close to letting you do this it will be OpenJNLP. You
can at least modify the application to work under 2.2 (hopefully you dont
need to make a non 1.3 DOM implementation to support it) and then have the
application you build on Mac (OpenJNLP using the Mac MRJ app builder) can be
the application which caters for JNLP files from Internet Explorer. Then -
as long as your Java application which is being launched can cater for MRJ
2.2 then you can use a generic webstart deployment. The key issues here is
that 1. your mrj2.2 client will need LOTS of work to run with the 1.1.8
version of Swing and still be working on 1.3 and 1.4
2. you may (probably) need to do lots of work to get the openjnlp app to run
under mrj2.2 and
3. you will need to distribute several sun jars (namely swing 1.1.8) with
both openjnlp AND the webstart client (using conditional download)

In addition to the OpenJNLP distribution jars, we needed to include swingall and
the collections framework.
_______________________________________________
java-dev mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/java-dev
Be sure to read the FAQ http://developer.apple.com/java/faq/ before posting
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.


Visit the Apple Store online or at retail locations.
1-800-MY-APPLE

Contact Apple | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2007 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.