Question

I’m pretty new to Perl but have been programming in java for several months now (coming from a C++ background). I wrote a Perl script that parses some data logs and now the customer I’m working for wants a GUI. The GUI has been created as a java applet (using Netbeans) and I would like to “embed” the perl script inside its jar file as a default safety feature. Multiple updates are expected for the perl script later in the future, so I want to set it up so that all the user has to do when an update comes along is define a new file path to the latest perl script through the GUI. I’ve already implemented this functionality with a file browser and everything works fine.

The problem I’m running into is something very simple that’s probably not very hard for someone with more java experience. Just in case one of the updated perl scripts they receive in the future doesn’t work properly, I want them to be able to use the default “embedded” script if they have to resort to that. When I’m running the applet through Netbeans, everything works perfectly however when I try and run the jar file from the command line, the program returns an error saying it cannot find the file. I might not be using the correct terminology to search for a solution to this problem, but I would like to be able to have my jar file execute the embedded perl script at runtime. Any suggestions are appreciated. I’ve tried placing the perl file in the same package as the java files and calling for the script by its filename alone, but that was a no go.

Answer 1

You can access any file in the jar as a classpath resource, but the problem you’re going to have is users may not have a perl interpreter installed.

EDIT: Since you’ve mentioned that users will have a Perl runtime, then this is doable. You can try piping the contents of the file using Process.getOutputStream() or just copy the contents to a temp file with File.createTempFile() and pass that file name as an argument to the perl interpreter.