On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Pavel Tolkachev wrote:
> > IMO, the cross-platform capabilities of java are seriously hurt by all the hoops
> > that end-users have to jump through (setting up classpaths, .sh/.bat files, etc)
> > just to get someone elses application to run. Admittedly, java installshield and
> > the like do do a good job of setting this stuff up, but a more general (and built
> > in) solution is required.
> >
> > [ bryce ]
> According the Sun (unfortunately I do not remember URL) the 'preferred'
> way to specify classpath is do not set CLASSPATH environment variable at
> all (namely because it is not portable) but to use -cp and -classpath
> for jre start (apparently -classspath is for 'everywhere used' packages
> like Swing, probably JGL and jpython) and -cp for the application
> classpath itself and other its specific packages. Anyway you will
> usually have non-portable scripts to start applications... probably
> concatenating command line from other environment variables not
> deprecated by Sun like SWING_RELEASE_PATH :). For development (where we
> need to use java instead of jre) all should be put in -classpath, I
> beleive.
My 2K CLASSPATH is a problem in itself: I did a bit of creative scripting
to do it, and had do do the same thing on OS/2 (the OS/2 commndline can't
be that long before substitutions)
Worse, though, is the time Java spends searching through all the
directories, jars and zips (and those zips causes some confusion to the
script - some contain source, not classes).
If I developed in C++ on OS/2 using OS/2's Visual Age C++, I would have
tools to repackage and redistribute necessary DLLs. If I use all the bits
of java I have here (and it's all free), and I create something roughly
equivalent to hotjava using the POP3, SMTP & FTP bts I got from IBM, Swing
1.1, collections 1.1 (SUN) then my distribution's getting cumbersome and may
not perform well either on some platforms, at least during startup.
Worse yet, an applet version might be truly appalling, at least to users on
the wrong side of a modem.
Cheers
John Summerfield
http://os2.ami.com.au/os2/ for OS/2 support.
Configuration, networking, combined IBM ftpsites index.
