Question

how to I open a URL with the systems standard browser with Java?

I currently use this code for opening a specific URL (locally stored html file), which works fine when I run the application with my IDE (Eclipse), but after bundling the software, it doesn’t work any more.

    url = MainWindow.class.getResource("mySite.html");

    helpMenuItem.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
        public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {    
            try {
                java.awt.Desktop.getDesktop().browse(url.toURI());
            }
            catch (URISyntaxException e1) {
                e1.printStackTrace();
            }
            catch (IOException e1) {
                e1.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
    });

Any suggestsions?
Thank you very much!

Answer 1

but after bundling the software, it doesn’t work any more.

You cannot browse to URL’s which points to resources inside a JAR file. You need to extract the resource (just get InputStream using getResourceAsStream()) and store it somewhere else (as temp file?) and then browse it instead.