Audit log + manual update + specify download location

Question

Hi all,
I'm evaluating whether we can use Java Web Start for our new product, for geographically distributed software deployment.
I've the following questions that I could not find answers in the official documentation:
- Can it support manual update? i.e. is there any way I can put a button on the application UI so that instead of checking latest version on every program start, the end-user can manually initiate software update.
- Can I extend it to support audit log? i.e. we need to keep track of which client upgrade to which version in a centralized database (as audit trail), and when such update occurred. Can we do this?
- Some of our end-user has no access to local filesystem, they only have access to dedicated shared network drive, can we customize Web Start so that it download and save the new version to a specific location, instead of C:\temp?
- We have a few jar files for the application. How can we ensure that all jar files are either updated, or not updated at all? i.e. kind of transaction concept.
- One of the jar files contains some configuration files, which need to be expanded in exploded format (to allow runtime change of configuration options). How can we do that?
Thanks a million.

Answer 1

Hi all,
I'm evaluating whether we can use Java Web Start for
our new product, for geographically distributed
software deployment.
I've the following questions that I could not find
answers in the official documentation:
- Can it support manual update? i.e. is there any
way I can put a button on the application UI so that
instead of checking latest version on every program
start, the end-user can manually initiate software
update.currently, no - this is a requested feature being considered for 6.0
>
- Can I extend it to support audit log? i.e. we need
to keep track of which client upgrade to which
version in a centralized database (as audit trail),
and when such update occurred. Can we do this?only by controling a servlet or jsp page that generates the jnlp file and keeps track of what requests are made for the jnlp file and the resources of the app. Java Web Start itself runs on the client machine.
>
- Some of our end-user has no access to local
filesystem, they only have access to dedicated shared
network drive, can we customize Web Start so that it
download and save the new version to a specific
location, instead of C:\temp?webstart itself only downloads into its own cache (by default on windows XP at c:\Doccuments and settings\<user name>\Application Data\Sun\java\deployment\cache\javaws
this cache location can be configured.
in version 6.0 we will have capability to disable caching, but curent version must have a cache.
>
- We have a few jar files for the application. How
can we ensure that all jar files are either updated,
or not updated at all? i.e. kind of transaction
concept.
Java web Start currently checks timestamps of all downloaded jars before launching application, and will only update all or none.
- One of the jar files contains some configuration
files, which need to be expanded in exploded format
(to allow runtime change of configuration options).
How can we do that?If you must access these resources as files, you will have to extract them using ClassLoader.getresourceAsStream(), and then write them to disk yourself.
>
Thanks a million./Andy