On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Peter W. Draper wrote:
> > > We could disregard this view. Or we could demonstrate that there is a very
> > > simple installation mechanism (like Acrobat for example).
> >
> > if we did this, WebStart might be a good way to go.
>
> WebStart does seem to avoid many of the problems of applets (if you've
> never tried WebStart have a go, it is good), however, I've never looked
> into how native libraries are handled (other than to see passing
> references to this in the documentation).
I haven't used WebStart with native libraries, but I've read enough
of the docs to be of the opinion that it ought to work OK for us.
The other thing we'd need to do is see about signing jar files.
> If this works, then we would need to commit to producing shareable
> libraries for a larger range of OSes than at present.
Well, it would be nice, but I wouldn't say it's essential - if we
can provide native libs for win32, linux, solaris that covers quite
a lot of people.
If anyone wants to see WebStart in action, Mike Read at the ROE has
put a TOPCAT webstart facility into the SuperCOSMOS archive.
Go to
http://thoth.roe.ac.uk/ssa/radial.html
do a search near RA=185, Dec=0, select FITS or VOTable output, and
submit. Below the HTML form that's returned you'll see a TOPCAT
logo; hit the link and it opens up TOPCAT displaying the results.
WS will probably give you dire warnings about doing this since
the jar file is not properly signed - live dangerously.
Of course you need WebStart installed (unzip /stardev/java/jre/javaws*zip).
--
Mark Taylor Starlink Programmer Physics, Bristol University, UK
[log in to unmask] 0117 928 8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/
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