java web start alternative

Question

We're looking for an alternative to Java web start that effectively does the same thing, just better implemented. We're having massive trouble with it. We have a few offices of XP desktops, all slightly different and so far only a handful have worked without serious tweaking. Problems are to do with not playing nicely with the proxy settings (using direct connection in Java control panel allows it to work), refusing to run when params like "-Xmx" are set but running fine when they aren't (until it runs out of memory) and other odd problems that we can't fix.

The way web start works is exactly what we want, i.e. connecting to a server that has the app, downloading anything that's changed, keeping a cache of jars, etc. Other teams here use 'clickonce' for their C# apps and it does effectively the same thing but seems to be less trouble.

I'm convinced we're not the only people to have run into this but searching around doesn't really show any alternatives. We've looked into writing a stub local application that is essentially just a URLClassLoader that loads up our app over the network on the fly but unfortunately that's too slow from other offices. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks

Update

In case anyone is curious as to what eventually happened, we gave webstart another month or so but continued to run into problems so we implemented our own version. It's basically just a stub that has a URL class loader that you point at a webserver. It's < 200 lines of code and it has been working perfectly for months. It's not ideal but until someone improves webstart we'll stick with it.

Update 2018

So, several years later and I'm working on a new project with the same problem. Instead of writing our own webstart implementation this time we're using getdown. We've found it to be a vast improvement over web start and it's been working really well for us.

Solution 1

My company is also experiencing webstart pain especially with JRE 1.6 update 19 and 20. Our problems revolve around the Mixed Code security warning. (everything is properly signed and the problem is intermittent)

Anyhoo, I stumbled across getdown by threerings. I haven't tried it yet, but seems promising https://github.com/threerings/getdown/wiki

Solution 2

I use JWS extensively in my company. The ONLY real problem that I've seen with JWS occurs only when you try to run JWS from cache AND your client's machine has just upgraded to a newer version of Java. The application will fail to launch with a "Unable to launch", "cache file not found" error or something similar.

There are two ways that I use to fix this problem: I either clear the cache and have them reinstall the app, or I simply have them click on the URL again from my website (easiest for my users). In both cases, the problem fixes itself. This would explain why several developers here never see this problem, most likely because their users always click on a URL instead of the installed launcher.

As a workaround, and in some of my mission critical apps, I use either of the following inside a script:

java -jar netx.jar -jnlp http://url/to/my/launch.jnlp

or

javaws http://url/to/my/launch.jnlp

where netx is a third party library.

It is not the prettiest solution, but for me these work 100% of the time.

Now, if I could only figure out how to get the desktop shortcuts from not going to hell... but that's a discussion for another time.

Solution 3

we also use JWS a lot and since around 1-6_19 it realy started to be a pain. Some apps started up 1-6_19 others didn't then we updated to 1-6_20 and it was sort of the other way around. Then update to 1-6_21/2/3/4 and problems only changing. We might give up. It looks like the development team since Oracle took over changed. Otherwise there is no other explanation to make JWS worse then better.

Solution 4

GetDown seems to be flaky as well. I just tried some of the game websites they advertise as examples in action. They all failed to load in my Firefox. Maybe my Java to Firefox integration is to blame? I've got JRE 7 32-bit installed after JDK 1.6 64-bit.

In general Web Start problems and poor user experience many times are related to the way Java was installed on the users machine. On Windows I noticed that if you install older version of Java after newer (expecting both will co-exist), I start getting problems running applets and WS applications.

Solution 5

I find all your probles quite strange. i've worked during a certain time in a company distributing its trading software using JWS, and it always worked really fine. Have you considering taking a look at the unofficial Java web start FAQ before dropping the whole technology ?

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