Hi List,
Yes, I do know the JNLP plugin which is doing great job for the restricted goals of one deployment of one project.
The thing is... maven project-descriptors and jnlp descriptors share an amount of similarities...
I was thinking about writing a servlet that would accept as parameters a project name and version, as well as a main-class and invocation attribute. The result would be a jnlp file referring a jar served from the maven repository (probably following the repository chain defined in the associated maven) with references to jnlp-described project-dependencies and their jar(s).
This would allow anyone to run, say, helped with a form that a developer would write, many type of demo programs and most probably real programs as well with few clicks and, of course as well, using the java_ws command (this might be trickier to provide parameters though).
The striking advantage is of course the web-start characteristics: it would not need any update of the client to run, for example, that precise main-class in this project.
At least for bosses this would be advantageous.
And for developers, I think the amount of work is small, very small.
What's missing ?
-> write the servlet (that's not big, it's very close to adapting the jelly the jnlp plugin)
-> have all the projects one depends on include their project.xml in the repository (would be needed only to provide appropriate information about the jar, e.g., to be accessed in a similar fashion as the jnlp plugin does)
-> have the jars signed. For now, there is no other choice than let the servlet sign the jars (pretty expensive, this should be cached) which are not signed beforehand. I think however it would make sense that people producing the download do sign their jars. Be it in the name of the Apache Foundation (for the Apache ones) or in the name of themselves. Having a myriad of signatures can be annoying for the user also... that's another story...
What do you think ?
Paul
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