Re: How to do local distribution?

From:

"Mike Schilling" <mscottschilling@hotmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 05:53:41 GMT

Message-ID:

<FT0Qh.11568$JZ3.1663@newssvr13.news.prodigy.net>

Patricia Shanahan wrote:

I have a specialized Java application that is growing. Although I'm
the only user, as well as the developer, I use it on several different
systems. It already uses a couple of Jar files for additional
packages, and I'm considering adding another one.

I would like suggestions for the best way of "distributing" it.

Currently, I manually copy the supporting Jar files to each system,
and try to keep them up to date. The result of my Eclipse build
process is a Jar file containing only my application class files.

Most of the systems are MS WindowsXP systems for which I am the
administrator. One system is a Linux-based grid on which I am a
non-root user.

Is there some reasonably convenient way I can package the application
up with the right versions of the additional Jar files, so that I
only have on file I need to move around.

I suppose that you can't share a disk among all these systems, because you'd
have thought of that.

Assuming you develop on one of the XP systems, you could run a service on it
that allows clients to fetch the up-to-date jar files and the name of the
main class (not trivial to write, but not too difficult), and write a
program that:

1. Connects to the service and write all the jar files to a temp directory.
2. Creates a URLClassLoader that access all the jars just written
3. Loads the main class and runs it