Jayson Falkner's Blog

November 2005 Archives

Blarg #18: Sun enhances WebStart or Sun breaks WebStart and upsets people? You decide.

Here is something that upsets me quite a bit.

What happens? That SSL certificate you bought that worked just fine for signing code that is used by WebStart 1.4 releases now might not work with WebStart 1.5 releases. Make that probably won't work from sources such as GoDaddy.com or Thawte. Worst yet, keytool doesn't complain when signing your code. You won't see the problem until running the app as a user.

As a user commented in the bug report.

You mean the Thawte Super Cert we just renewed for US$700+ cannot also be used for code signing???  UN-F-ING-BELIEVABLE.

And a later user followed with.

[...] Whoever came up with this new feature should be fired.

I pretty much agree. What is this change? A ploy to get folks to buy another, more proper certificate and a touch of lets-cripple-webstart-some-more? I really hope someone has a fantastic reason for explaining this WebStart change. Please keep it simple so I can use it to answer all the e-mail's I get about Sun's auto-update clobbering my JNLP apps.

Suggested fix: keep compatibility with WebStart 1.4. Who cares if your SSL certificate doesn't have code signing extensions?

Blarg 17: Ant command line parameters broken?

I like using Ant. I think it rocks. I can't say I'm as much a fan of Windows, and here is a work around I'd like to highlight in a google-cacheable location.

Recently I bumped a development environment running on a Windows XP box up to JDK 1.5 along with installing Ant 1.6.5. Suddenly any command line parameters passed to ant were being ignored. The fix? Make sure you don't have any trailing backward slashes ("\") in your path variables, e.g use C:\foo instead of C:\foo\.

Why? Windows and Java have a fun way of escaping them. Here is a link to a good talk on the feature along with a more proper writeup.

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