"Java Web Start" for IcedTea

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Rick,

On Fri, 2007-10-12 at 15:51 -0400, Rick Niles wrote:
> I just mentioned three Free replacements for javaws: NetX, OpenJNLP, and 
> JavaURL.  You find NetX at:
> http://jnlp.sourceforge.net/netx/index.html

Yes, we really should include one of these in IcedTea. For IcedTea we
did already convert gcjwebplugin to work with openjdk.
http://fitzsim.org/blog/?p=21 That works pretty nicely. It was
integrated into IcedTea 1.3
http://langel.wordpress.com/2007/08/28/icedtea-13-released/
And now actually ships with Fedora RawHide
http://spindazzle.org/greenblog/index.php?/archives/73-IcedTea-is-Fedorable.html

We haven't integrated a free replacement for webstart yet. But with GNU
Classpath we have been using NetX, which is free and works although only
implements an older jnlp version

> Maybe I'm missing your point....that they implement JNLP, but somehow 
> don't really replace javaws...?

Yes, Sun has an implementation of both the webplugin for applets and
javaws for jnlp webstart files. But neither has been released under a
free software license. Which is why we integrated gcjwebplguin into
IcedTea. I don't know whether or not there is any plan or schedule for
releasing the Sun implementation. But we can certainly get around that
with the free replacements that you mentioned for IcedTea.

> By "next version of Fedora" I mean, Fedora 9.  Fedora 8 is already 
> frozen.  Sorry to be unclear, but they start freezing each next release 
> so early, I think this is the time to consider improvements for Fedora 9.

Yes, IcedTea 1.4/OpenJDK b21 is the thing that will be in Fedora 8
(final freeze date was last Friday). I am sure we will have
webstart/jnlp covered for Fedora 9, probably through netx.

Cheers,

Mark