Auto-update of native application bundles

[Richard Bair]

> Advantages and disadvantages both ways, it would be good to get input from
> the community and other JFX'ers on this.

Some additional thoughts. If you have an application where  you release updates infrequently, then having the diff approach works reasonably well, because you don't have to have diffs for everything. You could for example only maintain a diff for CURRENT-1 to CURRENT. But anybody on CURRENT -2+ would have to just download the full new app. For infrequent upgrades, that is reasonable. Potentially it could be configurable for any CURRENT - N.

On the other and, if you are doing a lot of rapid prototyping or evolution of your application (think web-style development where you might update multiple times a day), then doing the versioned-file approach is way nicer. One could imagine supporting jmod files in this manner in Java 8 (check the module dependencies, grab the ones that have changed, etc). With jmod you might not even need the xml file?

Another thing is that I don't like putting anything in ~/.javafx if we can avoid it, and certainly not application specific stuff. Having all application settings, configuration options, etc in the application directory itself is preferable, because it means we never end up with situations where somebody has deleted the application (just dragging the .app to the trash on mac) and then they download the app again and it gets confused with settings we've stored and were never cleared up. I don't know which way that argues, just that I think we should not store anything outside of the app directory.

Richard