Strange behaviour during javaws -about

[Omair Majid]

On 02/18/2011 07:01 PM, Dr Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> On 10:11 Fri 18 Feb     , Omair Majid wrote:
>> Personally, I dont think running an online application for showing the
>> about dialog is a great idea. A user using a particular version of
>> icedtea-web would want to see information about that particular version
>> (and not the version that just happens to be on icedtea.classpath.org).
>> If anything, I think javaws -about should launch the local version about
>> about. (This also takes care of the problem that we ship an about.jar
>> that's completely unused!)
>>
>
> Yes, the current situation seemed very odd to me when you told me
> about it.  Apart from the things you already mention, it presumably
> means javaws -about fails when there is no Internet connectivity!
>

While I agree that this is a problem, I think this can happen only on 
the first run. About.jnlp is then cached (per user) and successive uses 
of javaws -about should work when offline too.

>> As for security permissions, I agree that we should remove
>> all-permissions it if it's not absolutely necessary.
>>
>> That said, I do think the permissions are required by the about
>> application as it currently stands.
>> extra/net/sourceforge/jnlp/about/Main.java contains these two lines:
>> import net.sourceforge.jnlp.Launcher;
>> import net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.JNLPRuntime;
>> while JNLPRuntime executes these two lines before about.jnlp gets a
>> chance to run:        Security.setProperty("package.access",
>>
>>       Security.getProperty("package.access")+",net.sourceforge.jnlp");
>> So I believe the about application will throw security exceptions on
>> start if it does not have full permissions.
>>
>
> What is the point of these statements?  What do they do as part of the
> about box?  I would have thought, naively, it was just displaying text
> in a dialog box.
>

I havent looked into this in too much detail, but basically the dialog 
contains links to some sample/test JNLPs. Rather than invoking javaws 
(which could launch another implementation of javaws), it tries to use 
an internal API to get Netx to launch the JNLPs.

Cheers,
Omair