I have some application, which has ability to update itself. Its downloads the jar file from the net, and then tries to replace used jar to run this application by downloaded one.
But I cannot to do that, because the file is locked by windows, because application is still running.
Does anybody know some workaround of that?
One of the popular solutions for this is to run your updater as a separate program. Have you ever noticed that Firefox has to restart when it is updated? Well that is because a separate process (updater.exe) is updating the files, then starting Firefox again.
You can try this approach. The only obstacle I see in the way is trying to automate the MAIN program to close itself. The only portable way to do this (in my head) is for the main application to wait for a kill signal via a local socket, and the updater can send the command through local networking. One more thing you have to consider is that the updater has to run in a separate java process. If your main program just creates a new Updater object, the Updater will co-exist with the main program’s JVM, which brings you back to square one.