Applets issue - 32bit browsers and 64bit JVM

[Werner Lehmann]

Joe,

would you clarify the current situation regarding 32/64 bit and Webstart?

On Windows basically all browsers are 32 bit. And yes, I am ignoring IE 
64bit and nightly builds of 64bit Firefox. If FX runtime and JRE are 
both 32 bit there is obviously no problem. If FX and JRE are 64 bit 
though, will this work for a JNLP link in a 32bit browser? Does this 
even depend on the deployment toolkit plugin in the browser, or is it 
simply launching the javaws.exe associated with JNLP file type, even if 
that javaws.exe belongs to a 64bit runtime?

On Mac (10.8+) everything is 64bit anyway if I am not mistaken.

Thanks...

Werner

On 19.09.2012 15:29, Joe McGlynn wrote:
> Hi Pedro,
>
> This is certainly a problem we want to address.  It's not new, nor is
> it even specific to FX applets/web start applications.  In the past
> it hasn't been as big a problem as most 64 bit systems still had 32
> bit browsers.
>
> We believe we can address this by supplying a more universal "plugin"
> that can launch the app using either a 32 bit of 64 bit JRE.  It's
> significantly simpler for webstart, but theoretically possible for
> applets as well.  Then users only have one JRE installed, and we can
> launch the app regardless of which one they've installed.
>
> There is a grey area that requires more thought -- what about
> applications that depend on native code?  How can we make specifying
> both platform-specific an chip arch-specific native extensions
> practical?
>