Webstart and language specific text files

[jan dressen]

hello, I am starting to understand how webstart works, but I am still having a bij problem...

I have several langauage specific files that my customer needs to be able to edit manually in the file explorer. But I can't find them anywhere when webstart downloaded the application. I only see folders with number names...

can anyone help?

thank you

[Maneesh Godbole]

Some more information please.
What do you mean by

when webstart downloaded the application

[jan dressen]

well, as far as I know, Webstart downloads the application to a cache... but my language specific text files are nowhere to be found...

[Maneesh Godbole]

The cache is used by the jvm to store the required files locally. Think of it as system files. I do not think allowing the user to edit something in the system files is a good idea. You can probably provide a UI in your application to edit them.

What exactly do these files contain? Some editable properties? If yes, then you can access them using System.getProperty() Take a look at this thread https://coderanch.com/t/200507/JNLP-Web-Start/java/JWS-properties-file
If it contains something more complicated than properties (name value pairs) you can probably treat them as resources. (Note: I have not tried this out myself) More on resources here http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/javaws/developersguide/syntax.html#resources
Another way (more elegant in my opinion) would be to store them on the server. Since you are using JWS, you can get/send this data from the server. If your application has multiple users, you will of course need to map these to the user.
Another option might be using the Java Preference API

Of course I am just thinking out loud here as I really don't know much about your application and requirement.

[jan dressen]

thank you for providing me with some good ideas and alternatives, but the application is built on properties files with name, value pairs. And the user needs to be able to edit them outside the application(as described in our companies project manifest). So it think shifting our JWS ideas to using the Eclipse update system is a better idea...

[Jan Cumps]

jan dressen wrote:t... And the user needs to be able to edit them outside the application(as described in our companies project manifest). So it think shifting our JWS ideas to using the Eclipse update system is a better idea...

That is perfectly possible for a JWS application. You do not have to touch (and you'd better not touch) the cache for that.
I would not let that requirement be the decider between JWS or Eclipse based.