Webstart 1.5 question

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

Ok, this is going to be a stupid question with an obvious answer, but it’s evading me up to this point.

I download a webstart link, it gets the latest and runs. That webstart link is updated, I click on it, it will not get the latest and then bombs.

If I start up webstart and delete the library file, it will then download the latest and run.

I’ve looked through the preferences many times but don’t see why it’s not trying to download the latest each time. It’s even skipping the checking for updates part of the load.

This just started with 1.5 for me.

#2

Can you reproduce with 1.4.x?

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, “Sun betas generally do not work, and you should never expect them to work at all. If they do, feel lucky you can play with them before they go gold. If not, assume it’s a bug and prepare to file a report”.

EDIT: this could be a regression, I used to have similar problems a long time ago, and for years gave up on webstart entirely. You don’t mention what platform you are using, which DOES tend to make a difference with JWS bugs…

#3

[quote]Can you reproduce with 1.4.x?
[/quote]
No, 1.4 works fine.

[quote] At the risk of sounding like a broken record, “Sun betas generally do not work, and you should never expect them to work at all. If they do, feel lucky you can play with them before they go gold. If not, assume it’s a bug and prepare to file a report”.
[/quote]
right, but I haven’t heard anyone else with this problem.

System(s):

  1. P4 3.0GHz Radeon 9700Pro Windows XP Pro
  2. P4 2.4GHz GeForce 3 Windows 2000
  3. P4 1.9GHz GeForce 440 Windows XP Pro

happens on all 3 systems.

#4

Not that I can offer any specific help :(, other than to suggest you lookup the old bugs in JWS with Windows (I have no bookmarks for them, but there were workarounds to try out) but it may be useful to know what webserver is providing the JNLP.

I would suggest doing a “telnet server.com 80” and


GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: server.com

…since that will, amongst other things, give you the precise version of the webserver. This is likely to be useful info to Sun if you need to log a bug.

You could be really diligent and download Ethereal, and packet-sniff to see what HTTP message was being returned that killed JWS. For instance, it could be that the webserver is suffering an intermittent problem (e.g. overloaded, being hit by a port-scanner or weak DoS attack etc), causing it to return a non-standard (possibly even illegal) HTTP response to the webstart request.

Most webservers available today (like most web browsers) are broken, despite the simplicity of the HTTP protocol :(.

#5

Which version of Java does the jnlp file request? 1.4+ or something else?