Re: Write once, run anywhere?

JT wrote:
...


I find your constant reference to made up
methods/classes to be quite unhelpful in
discussing x-plat isssues. As such, I will
ignore that for the moment to talk about
J2SE and javax methods.

The AppletContext attached to each Applet has
a method showDocument(URL) that hopefully
changes the web page. I say 'hopefully' because
it may or may not work (AppletViewer does not
implement it, and some browsers or browser
plug-ins block it), and worse is that it returns
nothing to indicate success/failure, and does
not throw any exceptions when it fails. It is not
of any use for data/pages that *must* be displayed.

By contrast, the web start based JNLP API also
has a BasicService.showDocument(URL) method.
The BasicService is only available to web start
applications and applets - attempts to obtain a
BasicService instance will *throw* *an* *exception*
in code not launched using web start.

Even more handy is that the BS.showDocument()
method will *return* *a* *boolean* indicating success
or failure to find the local 'default' browser and launch
it with the URL.

So, lets come back to your 'isCDDriveOpen' method
and presume that the API that provides that functionality
is available for Win and *nix flavors, but not Mac (so it is
not distributed with the Mac. deployment), and that
it is reliable on Windows, but may or may not work
on *nix systems.

A try/catch on loading one of the classes of that API
at startup should establish if the API is present, further
attempts to call classes or methods of the API might
check that first, then the isCDDriveOpen() method itself
might throw an exception if it is unable to act.

If the API had a method openCDDrive(), you might
also throw an exception, but another alternative is to
return a boolean, like BS.showDocument().

That being said, there are any number of simple and
silly traps programmers can fall into, that make code
break on other platforms. E.G.s

// use of platform specific file separators
File f = new File(".\\the\\directory\\thefile.txt");

// use of platform specific newline chars.
outputStream.write( "The next line\n" );

--
Andrew Thompson
http://www.athompson.info/andrew/

Message posted via JavaKB.com
http://www.javakb.com/Uwe/Forums.aspx/java-general/200706/1