Everyone:
I'd like to encourage everyone to take a good look at JavaWebStart. We've
been evaluating it in-house for the past few months and have been very, very
pleased. We've even managed to get j3d to install seamlessly across multiple
platforms (win32 & solaris) and, let me tell you, it's wonderful. You don't
even need to write an installer anymore; javawebstart takes care of it all.
We've had a few small issues: our applets to be signed since they reference
a resource that calls native code (this may change w. an official Sun
install since we all know they work dark magic) and, as Paul mentioned, you
need to have the javawebstart client installed on the target machines. On
the whole, though, the ease of use, power, modularity, etc. is great. We've
also noticed (informally--no numbers to back this up) that under Solaris our
performance increases relative to what we get when running with the plug-in.
Local applet caching so you can access them offline is also a very nice
feature. So I, for one, am very very glad that j3d is moving in this
direction.
A minor clarification:
Unless things have changed, I don't believe JNLP uses a browser plugin.
Instead, you configure your web server to indicate that jnlp files are of
the mime type application/x-java-jnlp-file. As for the client: under
windows, the javawebstart installer takes care of associating the webstart
client w/ this mime type & files that have the .jnlp extension. Under
solaris, you add a line to a configuration file that associates the mime
type w/ the webstart client. Very simple. Much simpler than installing
another plugin.
Paul:
Are the following facts correct? (Just want to make sure I've got this all
correct)
1. You're targeting early June (ie JavaOne) as a release date for jnlp-based
auto-install for j3d?
2. There will be a single URL which we can reference in the jnlp resource
tags and that the returned jnlp file will handle OS dependencies
transparently?
A question:
If webstart isn't installed on the target machine, will you find a way to
automatically install webstart or will you just install j3d on the client
machine? (or will users have a choice?) I wasn't clear based on what you
wrote.
thanks,
-Jean Laleuf
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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