Question

For my program I would like to check for a new update when it is run. I don’t want it to auto update. It doesn’t even need to provide a link to a new version.

I was thinking that how I should do it is, I should have a webpage like:

http://www.website.com/checkversion

The page would contain just 1 thing. It would contain a version number. The version number on the site would be the latest version that is released. If the version number is not equal to the one of the program it would make the user aware that there is a newer version. Else it would of course do nothing.

I have looked at this question:
Automatically checking for a new version of my application , and I it got me thinking. Is this the way I should be doing it? I’m not sure if doing it this way will provide me with enough ground you could say to give enough information.

I’m wondering which approach I should use and what sort of functions I would need to use as I have not played around with web based functions before.

Answer 1

As a general idea, this is pretty much what you have, I would recommend to return not just a number, but instead some dictionary/map, serialized as JSON or similar, so maybe in the future you would like to put more data, and still be compatible with old versions. For example, instead of returning :

1

return:

{"latest_version" : 5}

So if you want to add more details in the future, you may return:

{"latest_version" : 5, "minimal_compatible_version" : 2, "download_file_size_in_bytes" : 123456 }

The idea is to let the response expand (when you need to return more data) and still be backward compatible.

As for how to perform such a request, take a look here (although apache commons has a great library as well).