Re: plugins in Java Web Start

Posted by Bill Mohler on Oct 02, 2009; 9:21pm
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/plugins-in-Java-Web-Start-tp3690887p3690888.html

Curtis- I'm following up a very old question you posted, with a response from Wayne. How exactly to you configure you jpnl file, and where exactly are you putting the plugin jars? Are they bundled with ij.jar into a larger jar? Am I thinking off the right track? If you could share with me/us as much detail on getting remote plugin files to run on a naive client computer through JWS, would be very appreciative! Bill

Curtis Rueden wrote

Hi, I'm trying to package ImageJ for use with Java Web Start. I have included some user plugins in IJ_Props.txt, and additional JAR files containing the corresponding code. If the plugins folder exists on disk, this scheme works. But if there is no plugins folder, the user plugins fail to launch. This behavior is due to the following code in IJ's runUserPlugIn method: if (pluginsDir==null) return null; Is there a reason for this check? Even if the plugins folder is null the plugin could still be found by the system classloader (and in my case it would be). My question is: is there a way to specify "no plugins folder" such that the "Plugins folder not found" dialog does not appear, and bundled user plugins can still function? This could perhaps work by setting plugins.dir to "", or some other special value. I realize I could have a launcher class that creates the plugins folder if necessary, but that entails write access to the client storage device, which seems like an unnecessary requirement. Another solution would be to hack the ImageJ source, but I'd rather be able to drop in a new ij.jar when ImageJ is updated and have things automatically work. Thanks, -Curtis