[Openjnlp-devel] Uncertain silence of launching

[Kevin H. <ke...@na...>]

After playing around on non-Mac OS X platforms (and being gently prodded 
by Chris Heiny) I now have a good feel for the period of no feedback 
during the launch process that makes one wonder if something's happening 
and if the launch is going to work. It is particularly disconcerting 
from a shell because the external JVM is invoked and the current one 
immediately exits. No feedback until the app pops up. Yet another reason 
why Mac OS X's dock is so excellent, heheh.

Here are some of my ideas for appropriate feedback:

-Launcher needs a dialog that explains "updating launcher", "starting 
up", etc. This is shown by the launching JVM, not the new one. This will 
then give feedback about the new JVM being started.

-When the OpenJNLP internal launcher is invoked, it should spit 
something recognizable to stdout (e.g., "OpenJNLP Launcher v0.7") or 
somesuch, which the invoking JVM can then capture as an indication that 
the external launch is finished and the dialog can come down.

-Mac OS X seems to key off of uncaught exceptions in the main thread as 
an indicator of application death. OpenJNLP could use this to know that 
the app has blown up and trigger the appropriate feedback about a failed 
launch.


The key with all of this how to implement a feedback system that works 
both from the command line and from a GUI-based app. One of the goals of 
the openjnlp-lib is to avoid anything that brings up any GUI stuff.

This is all post-0.7 stuff and probably needs more thought/discussion.