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My continued failure to figure out how to deploy a Java application on Windows is holding up the entire volity.net website rollout, and thus delaying our search for money. I have been consistently enraged for about a day now. I have not been this angry at a computing platform for being an uncaring behemoth since the time I was forced to work with Oracle at Harvard.
I have found programs that will take my Jar and make an .exe out of it, and even some that make an .msi installer file out of it. This is a good start, but in every case the resulting program, if opened on a machine without Java installed, will not do the sane thing of silently downloading and installing Java, but instead tell the user that they don't have any Java and leaving them to do something about it.
And this is retarded. Most any non-technical user presented with a dialog nattering about unmet dependencies or (worse) thrown to an apparently random webpage at sun.com is going to include that the program is broken or virused or something, and will trash it without further thought.
Do Windows developers not know this? Do they just not care? Does working with an OS that is already user-hating in a thousand little ways desensitize you against not wanting to produce one more way?
SO ANGRY
I have found programs that will take my Jar and make an .exe out of it, and even some that make an .msi installer file out of it. This is a good start, but in every case the resulting program, if opened on a machine without Java installed, will not do the sane thing of silently downloading and installing Java, but instead tell the user that they don't have any Java and leaving them to do something about it.
And this is retarded. Most any non-technical user presented with a dialog nattering about unmet dependencies or (worse) thrown to an apparently random webpage at sun.com is going to include that the program is broken or virused or something, and will trash it without further thought.
Do Windows developers not know this? Do they just not care? Does working with an OS that is already user-hating in a thousand little ways desensitize you against not wanting to produce one more way?
SO ANGRY
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It was hard media at the time, but I did sell the software later through my own company as download-only. It was about 60 M without the JRE, so it was only half-again as big with the JRE as without.
Some users complained, but here's an important truth: users ALWAYS find something to complain about, and part of your job it to make user complaints as trivial as possible. I would rather have users complain about bloat than about the app falling over 'cause of their lame/broken/stupid JRE install. It's a difficult line to walk, but the turth is users don't always know what's best for them, and if you give a short, rational explanation they will usually be grudingly accepting of it.