Re: The oldest JRE version from those "popular"
apa-sf wrote:
Why do you ask?* You are not about to make the mistake
of coding 'down to' a particular VM in the hope of covering
'everybody' are you?
To be honest - as our applet is almost ready I was thinking about
trying to recode it slighty 'down to' and I was wondering what bottom
point would be reasonable.
I would not know which was popular or what was
reasonable even if I was confident that I understood
what you meant by those words. I'm not (confident).
It is a better strategy to choose the Java version required
to do the task, then ensure the end user has
a) enough interest to bother
b) enough help (from the deployer) to ensure that the
correct Java version is made available to the application
or applet.
You are right with that but for a common person downloading some JRE
and installing it as another application on the computer might be "to
much".
Who said anything about that? All the user has
to see is a couple of dialogs, and hit 'yes' at the
right moment(s). It takes some clever HTML and
helper applets on the deployer side, but the
end user can have a quite fast and simple
installation experience.
At this point I am jealous about the flash and how it is handled by
browsers ;)
(shrugs) How is that?
For comparison, modern Java (once it hits 1.5, I think)
has become automatically 'self updating', unless the
behaviour is overriden by the end user. When updating,
only the updated components are downloaded, making
an update very quick. Applications and applets can be
wrapped in JWS, to ensure they have any Java version
from a minimum n.n+, all the way to specifying a specific
minor version (as well as offering desktop shortcuts,
menu items, and automatic updates, to boot).
What does the Flash/browser combo. offer that's missing
from the combined strategy of the modern auto-updating
VM's and webstart deployment?
( & BTW - you could always use the nested <OBJECT>/<EMBED>
elements to do applet versioning, which I suspect is the
general strategy for deploying most Flash media - but then I
would not know much about Flash, since I refuse it's
installation at every opportunity - ..which about sums up,
how effective the flash is handled by *my* browser.. ;)
Andrew T.