Intermittent display problems in JRE 7

[David DeHaven]

> I will try to generate a new test applet for the display problem in our huge applet if I can't find a suitable applet from the large numbers of test applets at http://www.segal.org/java/.  I'm going through the collection of test applets and finding various problems.  
> 
> At Mike Swingler's suggestion I've already filed a bug report with Apple about the issue in the "Applet won't run first time on Safari" issue, and will add the details to http://www.segal.org/java/Hello/ URL.  I will file a report on the bug at http://www.segal.org/java/refresh/ with Oracle.    
> 
> If I install JRE 8, can I toggle between 7 and 8?  How close are we to the time that 7 users will get pushed to 8?  Our huge applet is in wide use for key medical decisions and we can't just tell everyone to wait or switch to Windows.

The main reason I suggested testing with 8 is there's currently no preview for 7u40 and frequently (at least in OpenJDK) fixes bake in 8 before being backported to 7u. There's generally a good chance that both versions will have the same fixes in cases like this.

For web applets, install 7 then move the plugin somewhere, install 8 and move to a similar location. Once you have both plugins, create a symlink in /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins pointing to the version you want to run. That's how I juggle versions for testing...

Example (irrelevant parts removed for brevity):
$ ls -l ~/java
...
drwxr-xr-x   4 daved  staff        136 Apr 24 13:42 7u13
drwxr-xr-x   4 daved  staff        136 Apr 24 13:43 7u17
drwxr-xr-x   4 daved  staff        136 Apr 24 13:43 7u21
...
$ ls -l /Library/Internet\ Plug-Ins
...
lrwxr-xr-x   1 daved  wheel    100 Apr 26 12:03 JavaAppletPlugin.plugin -> /Users/daved/java/7u21/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin
...


If you can run standalone then just set JAVA_HOME and the stub /usr/bin/java launcher will honor it. This *should* also work for javaws too when launched from the command line (not for double-clicking!), or you can just call it directly instead of using the launcher stubs in /usr/bin.

-DrD-