> I use it all the time - occasionally I need to make changes to what's > where, but very rarely. I'm sure it entirely depends on what you're > developing, but as I say, I rarely find it a problem. (When it *is* a > problem, it can be a nasty one to work out, admittedly.)
I'll freely admit, it can work for some people, if you're developing in a fairly stable environment, or if you dedicate a VM to each different environment. For my uses (which I don't think are too atypical) I work on too many different things with different requirements and don't want to install that many different VM's - or continuously change my environment settings to point to the right one. I did try extdirs when they were introduced - the idea seems attractive - but it failed miserably for me. > You mean like they already have? > See http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/guide/extensions/versioning.html > > I should point out I've never seen this actually *used*, but I haven't > looked, either. I wonder how much notice WebStart takes of it... Well, um, yeah. Actually, that's a start, but it's not the important half of it. The other half is that the requesting application should be able to ask for a particular version of a jar and get it from the VM. Version *stamping* is easy. Version *requesting* is more difficult to implement. I haven't seen this used, either. IMHO, this is one area Sun needs to do some serious work. My HD tends to fill up with multiple installs of VMs (every application wants to install its own), multiple versions of jars, even several copies of the same versions of jars (again, because each app wants its own). Don't even start me on vendors repackaging jars in their own names.... This is something the UNIX world worked out years ago in the with the so/lib versioning scheme. Conflicts happen, but they seem rare. The way Sun does jars today - especially with extdirs - they're leading us into yet another DLL-hell type arena. ....but now we're way off-topic. :-) roger
