5 ms·

At least on Mac OS X, you can double-click .jar files and they will get launched as the user expects, complete with Dock presence.

bni 14y ago
Yes, that is a bit better than Windows, were this functionality would have mattered the most to have from the beginning. Still, its not 100% the way OS X users expect apps to work.
- darklajid 14y ago
  You seem to be under the impression that Windows doesn't do the same. That's wrong. Windows does the same thing as OS X. You can do the same on Linux, even on the console over there (using binfmt_misc, see [1]) without a desktop environment. For as long as I can remember Java installed an entry in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT for .jar files. On my machine it's currently set up to run "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin\javaw.exe" -jar "%1" %* whenever I want to 'launch' a jar file. 1: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1667830/running-a-jar-file-without-directly-calling-java http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1667830/running-a-jar-fil...
  - jsight 14y ago
    The biggest problem that I've seen is that on Windows apps sometimes steal this association. I used to tell users to do this to launch Java applications, but it was surprising how many times they would end up in WinZip or some other Zip handling application. Java does try to get that to work by default, though.
    - freehunter 14y ago
      File compression utilities really do go way overboard on what they want to open as zipped files. Installing one usually means having to uncheck maybe half the defaults because they're more commonly used as regular file formats.
guard-of-terra 14y ago
Most Java applications are not built to work that way. They usually need the full CLASSPATH formed before they can launch. One .jar would not suffice.
- rquirk 14y ago
  The developer of a jar can specify a Class-Path entry in the Manifest file to set up the classpath correctly. In this case, "java -jar some.jar" is all you need. https://blogs.oracle.com/olaf/entry/jdev_including_a_classpath_in https://blogs.oracle.com/olaf/entry/jdev_including_a_classpa...

bni 14y ago

Yes, that is a bit better than Windows, were this functionality would have mattered the most to have from the beginning. Still, its not 100% the way OS X users expect apps to work.

darklajid 14y ago
You seem to be under the impression that Windows doesn't do the same. That's wrong. Windows does the same thing as OS X. You can do the same on Linux, even on the console over there (using binfmt_misc, see [1]) without a desktop environment. For as long as I can remember Java installed an entry in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT for .jar files. On my machine it's currently set up to run "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin\javaw.exe" -jar "%1" %* whenever I want to 'launch' a jar file. 1: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1667830/running-a-jar-file-without-directly-calling-java http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1667830/running-a-jar-fil...
- jsight 14y ago
  The biggest problem that I've seen is that on Windows apps sometimes steal this association. I used to tell users to do this to launch Java applications, but it was surprising how many times they would end up in WinZip or some other Zip handling application. Java does try to get that to work by default, though.
  - freehunter 14y ago
    File compression utilities really do go way overboard on what they want to open as zipped files. Installing one usually means having to uncheck maybe half the defaults because they're more commonly used as regular file formats.

guard-of-terra 14y ago

Most Java applications are not built to work that way. They usually need the full CLASSPATH formed before they can launch. One .jar would not suffice.

rquirk 14y ago
The developer of a jar can specify a Class-Path entry in the Manifest file to set up the classpath correctly. In this case, "java -jar some.jar" is all you need. https://blogs.oracle.com/olaf/entry/jdev_including_a_classpath_in https://blogs.oracle.com/olaf/entry/jdev_including_a_classpa...