Java Web Start is a technology that allows easy deployment of Java based software through a web browser. The advantages of this framework are numerous but one nice thing is that it allows you far more freedom then the completely sandboxed Java applet. In this post I will detail how I converted my Hash Verifier application to run right from the browser.
Java Network Launching Protocol (JNLP)
The javax.jnlp libraries provide the functionality needed to launch the application from within a web browser.
Both Java and Mono (the open source implementation of C# and .NET) will be receiving pretty big updates this year. These represent two very popular virtual machine based coding platforms that offer portability and a slew of helpful standard libraries. Here are just a handful of the improvements each will see in the coming release.
Java SE 7.0
While no tentative release date has been scheduled for Java 7 yet, the team has recently completed milestone 10 of 10.
Back in this previous post I mentioned the possibility of putting up a sort of how-to guide on SWT programming. Well I’ve finally found some time to do so. I will try to make this as step-by-step as possible so that anyone reading this will completely understand what I’m doing.
What you’ll need
I’m making the following assumptions before starting:
That you’ve already installed the Java Development Kit (not just the Java Runtime) That you’ve installed Eclipse.
After reading up on how you can use SWT to give Java a more native look and feel I was interested in giving it a shot first hand. I decided to break out old faithful (Hash Verifier) and re-write it completely in Java/SWT. The end result was an application that has essentially equivalent functionality (see below for differences) but is completely cross-platform. No matter what operating system you end up running this on (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux) it should have a native look and feel.
It’s no secret that while Java possess probably the most widely distributed, cross-platform, and common user interface libraries, graphical Java applications on the whole simply stand out for the wrong reasons. Whether the GUI comes in the form of the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) or Swing, each can be far from pretty and often do not mesh well with the platform they are being run on. For instance, running an AWT or Swing application can be an almost alien experience, no matter what operating system you are using, because neither uses the native control widgets.
Java is an excellent programming language but too often the JVM seems to slow it down. Yes I know that there have been tremendous speed improvements in recent versions but the fact remains that it can still feel slow. It also tends to use an insane amount of memory to do just about anything (the heap is cheap is the name of the game!). Well thankfully there are ways you can tighten the JVM’s belt and even fine tune its garbage collection process.
I honestly don’t remember how I came across this awesome project but I am certainly glad I did! XMLVM is a software toolchain which is designed to take cross-compilation to a whole new level. Rather than just offer OS portability, XMLVM is able to actually offer OS, hardware and programming language portability.
Here’s how it works: you write a program in a programming language of your choice, say .NET. Once compiled you send it through the first step of XMLVM which analyzes the produced CIL and creates an XML document out of it.
As someone who has recently begun to experiment with the Linux operating system I have also been introduced to .NET’s Linux’s cousin Mono. This has made me question what the best cross-platform program language to use is. I am familiar with both Java and various .NET languages (Visual Basic & C#) so I decided to run a few tests to see what the resource usage on my Linux laptop is like between these two competing platforms.
