Question

i searched google and this side and did some tutorials, i guess it is (like always) a one-line solution to my problem which is:

I have a “index.html” page including the following code:

<script src="http://www.java.com/js/deployJava.js"></script>
<script> 
    var attributes = {code:'gui.Applet.class', archive:'ComTool.jar', width:1288, height:800} ; 
    var parameters = {jnlp_href: 'Deploy.jnlp', draggable: 'true'} ; 
    var version = '1.7' ;
    deployJava.runApplet(attributes, parameters, version); 
</script> 

and the “Deploy.jnlp” file lookes like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<jnlp spec="1.0+" codebase="" href="Deploy.jnlp">

<information>
    <title>Tool</title>
    <vendor>Andrea</vendor>
    <homepage href="index.html"/> 
    <description>Tool for representing relations between components and their versions.</description>
    <description kind="short">Allows to change relations between components and their versions.</description>
    <description kind="tooltip">The test tool.</description>
    <offline-allowed/> 
    <shortcut online="false">
        <desktop />
    </shortcut> 
</information>

<resources>
    <j2se version="1.6+" href="http://java.sun.com/products/autodl/j2se"/>
    <jar href="WEB-INF/lib/ComTool.jar" main="true" download="lazy"/>
    <jar href="WEB-INF/lib/itextpdf-5.3.2.jar" download="lazy"/>
    <jar href="WEB-INF/lib/ojdbc6.jar" download="lazy"/>
</resources>

<applet-desc 
     name="Tool"
     main-class="gui.Applet"
     width="1288"
     height="800">
 </applet-desc>

 <update check="background"/>

 <security>
    <all-permissions/>
 </security>
</jnlp>

and both files are in the “WebContent” folder of my dynamic web project – the structure of that folder is:

WebContent/META-INF
WebContent/WEB-INF/lib/ComTool.jar
WebContent/WEB-INF/lib/itextpdf-5.3.2.jar
WebContent/WEB-INF/lib/ojdbc6.jar
WebContent/WEB-INF/web.xml
WebContent/Deploy.jnlp
WebContent/index.html

When right click the project the and chose “Run As / Run on Server” the “index.html” page is loaded but without the applet, literally. This means no error, no gray-box-of-death nothing like the page dose not find the JNLP file. The JARs are all signed and when i double click the “index.html” file in the explorer the everything works like it should work but not on the Tomcat 7.0 server managed by Eclipse Juno. The server runs and i think it is not the problem. Oh i almost forgot the web.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" 
xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd" 
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd" id="WebApp_ID" version="3.0">

<display-name>CompTool</display-name>

<distributable/>

<welcome-file-list>
     <welcome-file>index.html</welcome-file>
     <welcome-file>index.htm</welcome-file>
</welcome-file-list>

</web-app>

I guess i have to add something in the web.xml file? I went through this tag list but i didn’t find anything useful for me. I must also say dynamic web projects are rather new for me. I played around and found out that if i add this:

<error-page> 
    <location>/error.html</location> 
</error-page>

works neither, of course the “error.html” is in here:

WebContent/error.html

When this works i want to generate a WAR file of this dynamic web project and deploy it on an other server. I just created a dynamic web project and inserted the files, changed and double checked all paths and deleted the unnecessary entries in the “web.xml” files, i just want to minimize error sources, now is my question what am i doing wrong? Please i need help…

Best, Andrea

Answer 1

This was a hard one, here my mistakes if anyone encounters the same problem sometime:

1. Do not try to start a dynamic web project via “Run As” in eclipse, export it as WAR into the …Apache-Tomcat-7.0.34/webapps folder, it gets automatically deployed and works!
2. Do your homework, i thought i could load images for my GUI directly from the server, no i couldn’t. Applets run always on the client, therefore use URLs and URIs to load images(ask google for more on that).
3. If you want to save or create files on the server use Servlets, i got a wrong picture about that too…
4. OJDBC6.jar signed (also verified by jarsigner -verify ojdbc6.jar) can cause problems on reloading a HTML page, to solve this problem use fatjar (google…) and pack all your JAR files in one file (if you use ojdbc6), then sign it. It caused also something like a “unsigned resource in ojdbc6.jar” error at the start when i saved the applications temporary.
5. Use the “codebase” attribute in the jnlp to point via an URL to the applets location on the server.

i hope this helps.

A little bit less frustrated Andrea 🙂