A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

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

Today was all video games and attempts at Javolin release-engineering. Wading around in Java code is one thing, actually trying to package the stuff up for public consumption is quite another. The thing about Java applications is that their end-products have so many different morphologies; we may end up releasing, all under the same version-number banner:

• a .jar file containing only the Volity project's original code & resources


• a .jar file containing both original stuff and third-party libraries


• a .jnlp file that will magically do the right thing via Java Web Start (I have my doubts about this; I've rarely seen it work right on a Mac!)


• a Mac .dmg file, containing a Mac OS X-ready application


• a Windows executable (though I personally have no clue how to make these)


• a Linux executable (? or maybe the jar file is enough)

At any rate, we're inches away from the first Javolin release. While it's still far from fit for use by the casual gamers we see as our core userbase, it is complete enough for game developers to start using, and that's really cool.

Once this has floated I plan on starting to write a development tutorial. I sorta wrote one last year (currently online as the Volity Developer's Guide), but I don't think I went far enough with it; it was more of a narrative than the step-by-step-with-figures-and-exercises deal that I'm envisioning now. It will be a challenge; I've never written something like that before. Everything I write tends to turn into a windy narrative, no matter how technical a mindset I try to wear.