Richard Bair's Blog

Deployment

A new sub project has been added to SwingLabs today, http://deployment.dev.java.net. A few weeks ago Erik Vickroy approached me about starting a project related to deployment issues for rich client Swing applications. After a little brainstorming, it became clear that such a project would be a great addition to the SwingLabs suite of projects. Indeed, easing the deployment of rich client apps is an extremely important aspect of improving Swing developers' productivity.

We're looking forward to continued collaboration between the Deployment and Swing teams here at Sun and the Java developer community!

Comments

• This is good news. I've long thought that deployment was a profound pain point for J2SE developers, perhaps as big or bigger an issue than how native an app looks or other things we usually get hung up on. After all, it doesn't matter what it looks like if it's a pain to launch, right? I keep trying to get Joshua Marinacci to write a book on deployment: Web Start, InstallAnywhere, InstallShield, OS X .app bundles, JDIC, etc.

  Posted by: invalidname on October 04, 2005 at 02:57 AM

• Is it related to JSR277 JavaTM Module System
  The specification defines a distribution format and a repository for collections of Java code and related resources. It also defines the discovery, loading, and integrity mechanisms at runtime.
  http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=277

  Posted by: donsez on October 04, 2005 at 04:14 AM

• Well said invalidname; it's like saying that getting a decent mortgage is much more important than the color of the house.
  The deployment headaches were part of the decision to move a successful Swing application for internal users to the Web at a large university.
  

  Posted by: appmath on October 04, 2005 at 07:30 AM

• donsez: not at this point. They are a little different. JSR 277 (as I understand it) is aimed more at the next version of Jar file format, and maybe some OSGi like behavior. There sure could be some cooperation between this project and JSR 277 down the road, though. Do you have any good suggestions for cooperation points?

  Posted by: rbair on October 04, 2005 at 08:23 AM

• Of course, moving "to the web" presents its own set of headaches.

  Posted by: mnuttall on October 07, 2005 at 09:26 AM

• I think that JAR files are obsolete and should be replaced. This new "thing" sould be created having in mind a lot of things, but specially deployment.
  I have some ideas that I'd like to share with others.
  Do you know if there is a comunity or JCP or whatever working in this?
  Thanks in advance for your help.

  Posted by: peyrona on October 20, 2005 at 02:50 AM

• Apologizes for my last post: I was sleepy.

  Posted by: peyrona on October 20, 2005 at 02:52 AM

• Hey Peyrona,

  Yes, JSR 277 is aiming to replace jars

  Richard

  Posted by: rbair on October 20, 2005 at 08:01 AM

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