Re: Something to read over lunch: Eclipse IDEin thebrowser

Luis Colorado skrev den 05-02-2008 22:37:

Yes, I know that you can specify a Java version. But some of our customer's still had Java 1.1 or some semi-pre-historic version of Microsoft Java. So there were a lot of calls for support.

You are right... thick clients are nice because they give you more control, but updating all that stuff (and ensuring that users will update it) is a pain. Webstart is a nice solution to that problem.

What persuaded you to distribute a big exe file instead of using webstart?

The only reason it was big was because the jt400 library was included. Originally we were looking at deploying a bunch of jars with a BAT file, but then you have to consider how to distribute and install them to the user, or using web start. We have a thick client which use web start, and I asked the responsible developer what his experiences was (as far as I remember), and there were some issues. I believe of the kind of stale cache information in the web start client which was rather difficult to fix. Also Web Start requires a web server to download files from - which is yet another point of failure.

After I found that the one-jar + jsmooth combination allowed me to distribute a single EXE file which also knew how to guide the user to the java download page, and tested it to be stable, we went for that. Keep it simple.

That was about a year ago. No support issues (which most likely indicates that nobody use it), which I frankly does not believe would have been the case had we went for Web Start.

A thought: If Web Start is so good, why do Sun not use it for their installers (Netbeans e.g.) but create native binaries?

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Thorbjørn