Hi Meecrowave developers and users, I am nearly finished working on a Meecrowave extension for enhancing Meecrowave to be a desktop platform. Here is some background on my work: For some time I have been working on a desktop application that manages very sensitive data. The data it manages must be encrypted at rest and requires password authentication to start it. The application cannot be Cloud based. The application will be used by several dozen users so it needs to have an update mechanism where I can push out updates. I can't make the application purely JavaScript/Browser base since I need to use some Java libraries to access and manipulate the data. I am familiar with Applets and Java WebStart but those are now dead technologies. I actually built out an application using e(fx)clipse which is based on JavaFX and the eclipse RCP platform but my update libraries are behind an oauth protected web site and it took a tremendous amount of work to get the update site feature to work. It was also laborious for me to build the UI in JavaFX since that requires specialized knowledge that I don't use day to day. This brings me to Meecrowave. In the past I have used several commercial Windows applications that actually ran Tomcat as a service to render their presentation view for their application. I am also working on a server side application as well so using the same UI framework (Polymer) on both the client and server is appealing to me. I started to build my client application using WildFly-Swarm but the file size (130mb) was a little extreme considering I wanted support frequent updates. Meecrowave addressed all of my concerns with cutting edge API support, quick startup times, and small dependency sizes (25mb for my runner and 11mb for my application). Now getting to my potential contribution, I have added several features to Meecrowave to make it more desktop friendly: 1) System Tray - If one runs the Meecrowave jar as a java application it runs in the background and there is visible cue it is accessible. I used the Java AWT system tray to add an icon with a shutdown option to cleanly shutdown the server. 2 Browser launch - Again I used the AWT desktop API provided with Java to launch a browser instance to open the applications home page once the application is started. 3) Interactive Authentication with Derby - As I mentioned my application requires local authentication in order to decrypt the data. I built several Java swing forms for password creation, change, and authentication. These credentials are used to create or start an embedded Apache Derby database using AES 256 encryption. 4) OAuth Client Support - My application updates and remote resources are protected by an OIDC OAuth IDP so I built in a local OAuth JAX-RS client that manages refresh tokens in the Apache derby database. There are several examples of using CXF as an OAuth server but there is hardly any documentation on using CXF with a pure JAX-RS 2.0 client to interact with OAuth systems. 5) Update support - I built an update process that can independently update the runner jar and application war. It performs several actions like checking the local versions, fetching a version manifest file from a remote protected HTTPS server, downloading updated jar files, and rendering several Java swing forms to display the update status in real time. 6) Finally I built a simple CLI release manager that queries the local maven repository for version information and then injects version manifest files into a copy of the selected artifacts, jar signs them, and then uploads them to a central server. Currently my release manager uploads the update files to an AWS S3 bucket that my server application reads from but I can adjust it to publish to an SFTP server.
I have tested these enhancements on both Linux and Windows. The system tray doesn't work on my Linux system very well but everything else does. I also had contributing this code in mind when I developed it so I tried to make everything plugable and configurable. Please let me know if there is any interest in having these features contributed to the Meecrowave project as an extension. If so I can start to work on a github pull request. Regards, Aaron
