[jsword-devel] webstart

[DM Smith]

Troy,
    I had not looked at the program before. It is really useful! A few 
months ago, I tried refreshing my Greek by reading along in Nestle/Aland 
in church while scripture was being read in English.
    Today, I had a go at the flash cards. I was amazed by how much I 
remembered and by how much I forgot.

Anyway, wrt your question:

Can you recommend a SVN client for WinXP or plugin for Eclipse. If so, I 
will give it a go.

Quick tutorial on webstart. (I.e. what I learned the hard way)
Webstart uses jnlp files, which is an XML descriptor of an application 
and its resources.
All resources need to be in jar files and the program must be able to 
get them out of the jar.
When jars are listed, the one with the "main" needs to be listed first.
Webstart can display an icon and a splash that is not in a jar. This is 
a niceity that makes the solution look more complete.
Each jar needs to be signed by the same authority using jarsigner. (I.e. 
use the same keystore)
The jars and the jnlp file need to be in the same directory.
If your application accesses the internet or the local filesystem, it 
will need to be granted security permissions. The simplest is to grant all.
There is no way to pass command line parameters (that I am aware of).  
But properties can be set. Mark has recommendations for MacOS.

Here is a sample jnlp file:
<jnlp spec="1.0+" 
codebase="http://www.crosswire.org/ftpmirror/pub/flashcards" 
href="flashcards.jnlp">

  <information>
    <title>Flash Cards</title>
    <vendor>Crosswire Bible Society</vendor>
    <homepage href="http://www.crosswire.org/flashcards/"/>
    <description>Flash Cards</description>
    <description kind="short">Flash Cards  is a Bible study tool 
available over the internet</description>
    <description kind="tooltip">Flash Cards</description>
    <icon href="icon.gif"/>
    <icon kind="splash" href="splash.gif"/>   
    <offline-allowed/>
  </information>

  <security>
    <!--
    We need disk io to read installed Flash lessons.
    For simplicity, we are asking for all permissions.
    -->
    <all-permissions/>
  </security>

  <resources>
    <j2se version="1.4+" max-heap-size="512m"/>
    <jar href="Flash.jar"/>
    <jar href="FlashLessons.jar"/>
  </resources>

  <application-desc main-class="flash.Quiz"/>

</jnlp>

The one for the editor would be very similar. However, it would maintain 
a separate installation of everything. The only way I see around this 
would be to merge the two programs into one and make the editor a menu 
option.

The only change to FlashCards that I see is that the *.flash are not in 
a jar. They would need to be put into a jar and served from there. The 
code to get them out of the jar is pretty simple, you getResource(...) 
using an absolute path relative to the start of the jar. So if the 
lessons are in FlashLessons.jar in a directory named lessons, then 
lesson 3 would be gotten with getResource("/lessons/chapter03vocab.flash").

Alternatively, it can be done as we have done in jsword. We have put 
~/.jsword on the lookup path for resources. The program will do lookups 
there first and failing that then look in the jars. This allows for 
overrides and extensions.

The easiest way to get this "for free" is to include common.jar from the 
jsword project and add these lines to your main program:
            String path = System.getProperty("user.home") + 
File.separator + DIR_PROJECT;
            home = new URL(NetUtil.PROTOCOL_FILE, null, path);
            CWClassLoader.setHome(home);
where dir project is something like:
private static final String DIR_PROJECT = ".flashcards";

So what would you like?

Troy A. Griffitts wrote:

> Might anyone be willing to consider writing a webstart installer 
> thingy for our Flashcards application?  We have some students in class 
> who have had trouble unzipping and finding the correct jar to double 
> click, and it would be a great blessing to many people, and me, 
> personally, if we had something to help this process.
>
> SVN checkout with similar to:
>
> svn co https://crosswire.org/svn/flashcards/trunk flashcards
>
> Thank you for considering,
>         -Troy.