[Coco] DriveWire in Java

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Frank Swygert <farna at att.net> wrote:
> I thought the whole idea behind Java was portability -- in that as long as
> the version of Java (or higher) used to write the code was available for
> another platform it should run -- the Java code on the platform would take
> care of platform/OS specific things? So Java code written for Java V. xx.x
> (or whatever) would run on any platform with Java V. xx.x on it???

That's the idea, and for some things Java does work this way.
Unfortunately, any time you get very close to the hardware (in this
case any time I use a GUI component or talk to the serial ports) then,
while the source code does not need to change, the native libraries
do.

Mr. Hathaway clued me in to launch4j, which does many things to make
distribution of java applications easy on the user.  It can even
package a whole JRE along with the app, although that makes the
distibution file pretty large.   The one thing it might not be able to
do is to make the RXTX native serial libraries I'm using automatic,
but I haven't fully explored this yet.   At some point Java will
(hopefully) have decent serial support built in, so this issue may be
temporary anyway.

I believe that one way or another, we will be able to have "download,
click and run" simplicity for a java Drivewire server.  Still sorting
out the details though :)

-Aaron


> --------------
> Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2009 14:35:52 -0600
> From: "Boisy G. Pitre" <boisy at tee-boy.com>
>
> Aaron,
> I was just wondering today where you were on this.  I'm ready to give this a
> spin, so as soon as you have the OS X Java version going, please let me
> know.
> Boisy
>
> --
> Frank Swygert
> Publisher, "American Motors Cars" Magazine (AMC)
> For all AMC enthusiasts
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> (free download available!)
>
>
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