Antwort: Web Start

[arnd . beissner]

Hi Peter,

we use Web Start in a customer project. It's a good solution to deploy Java applications as a JAR file, even with native code and such.

Some caveats:
-The security manager can get in your way if you want things like filesystem access. You have to sign your jar and each user has to accept your signature once per application.
- You cannot catch uncaught exceptions in JNLP applications. This is useful for GUI applications, so you can catch and for example log these exceptions. With JNLP, AWT/Swing creates its own thread group so you're out of luck there. Maybe not an issue for fop.
- Only comes with JRE 1.4 by default, and older WebStart version are quite buggy in my experience.

So far I cannot see how exactly WebStart would be useful for FOP regarding licensing stuff, because your "sources" for parts like hyphenation libs still need to be JNLP jars, so you still need someone to actually provide these jars and thus take responsibility regarding legal issues. As for as I see it, you don't gain anything.

But if you have something more concrete in mind, please feel free ask more concrete WebStart questions.

Hope this helps,
--
Arnd Beißner
Cappelino Informationstechnologie GmbH


"Peter B. West" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> schrieb am 18.03.2004 15:40:19:

> Fops,
>
> Does anyone have any detailed knowledge of Web Start?  It occurred to me
> that it may be a way to resolve some of the licensing issues we (and
> other projects) are running into.  Any educated thoughts on the matter?
>
> Peter
> --
> Peter B. West <http://www.powerup.com.au/~pbwest/resume.html>
>