Is JNLP simpler than it looks?

[Mark McKay]

I've read through the JNLP programmer docs a few times, and am
wondering - is a web start app simply a plain old signed JARed app
with an extra JNLP file to aid web browsers in deploying it? If so,
does it make sense to make the jar executable via it's manifest?

Mark McKay
--
http://www.kitfox.com

[Christopher Blunck]

On Tue, 05 Aug 2003 08:21:42 -0700, Mark McKay wrote:

I've read through the JNLP programmer docs a few times, and am
wondering - is a web start app simply a plain old signed JARed app
with an extra JNLP file to aid web browsers in deploying it? If so,
does it make sense to make the jar executable via it's manifest?

Hey Mark-

You could do that, sure. But the main benefit (imo) of webstart is
the ability to distribute updated jars to the client automagically.
If you ship out signed executable jars, you've conquered the problem
of getting your application executing on the desktop. But what do
you do when you need to drop a patch release? Call up every person
that you ever shipped to and give them a new copy? Webstart can
help you in this regard, because clients automatically download
updated jars from the server.

-c