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I'll echo this. I owned a jnlp app, and most of the support we had was around walking people through installing a sufficiently correct jre. Not always easy to
by monknomo 6y ago
I'll echo this. I owned a jnlp app, and most of the support we had was around walking people through installing a sufficiently correct jre. Not always easy to do that
- nitrogen 6y agoWhen I was developing a Swing app, I ended up just distributing an NSIS installer that would automatically download and run the JRE installer if Java was old or missing, for that reason.
- specialist 6y agoI would have bet money the JNLP installer did this. But I'm probably remembering wrong and will defer to the collective wisdom of the hive.
- monknomo 6y agoI am about 90% sure there was some sort of 3rd party open-source wrapper that would download a jre. But I cannot remember what it might have been called
- coliveira 6y agoWhy apps don't just install a copy of the JRE (I believe it is redistributable).
- monknomo 6y agoWhen you're distributing a real installer with a swing app, including a copy of the JRE is definitely the thing to do. A jnlp app is a file format that defines how to launch a java executable over the internet. It defines the location where the executable is, and what version of java is required. Opening the jnlp to download and launching the app requires an installed JRE, or there is nothing to interpret the jnlp and go get the application. There is, iirc, a utility that will wrap a jnlp file and go get a jre. I forget what it's called, but it makes jnlp apps more like an auto-updating standard app. The benefit of the jnlp approach is if you can guarantee your users have java installed, then they don't need to install your app. Just click a link, then a java app self-downloads, installs and sets up a shortcut on the desktop. And it updates whenever they open it and a new version is detected.