Re: java.awt.headless rears it's ugly head

Hi Peter,

Oh, okay.. you're running an older version of the JVM (1.4.2). The new versions, as well as the 32-bit versions, run in PASE.

What's happening is that you're telling it to use the NAWT (Native AWT) support. Setting headless=true enables NAWT automatically, IIRC. Anyway, NAWT uses X11 ("X-Windows") technology, and that requires PASE. So you only see the problem when NAWT is enabled.

Newer versions of the JVM always require PASE. So even if you solved the problem by disabling headless support, the problem would resurface in the future when you used a newer JVM.

Using a background job (as you described) is probably your best bet. Whether you choose to use that for Java or for your PASE commands is up to you.

Peter Connell wrote:

I am leaving the JVM version as shipped by not overriding properties in
a systemdefault.properties file, so an iteration of the java properties
class reveals a raft of entries like -

java.vm.version=1.4 java.runtime.version=1.4.2_16-b05
java.class.version=48.0
os.version=V5R4M0
java.specification.version=1.4 java.vm.specification.version=1.0
java.specification.vendor=Sun Microsystems Inc.
java.vm.info=build JDK-1.4, native threads, jitc_de
java.version=1.4.2

Since java.awt.headless=true presently breaks existing production code
then I have resorted to offloading the request to a server job via a
data queue.

Peter