Java Reference
In-Depth Information
In this chapter, we will examine a simple application that can be deployed with JNLP.
In the previous chapters of Part III, we saw all the different aspects of JNLP technology in
detail; now we will put all the pieces together to assemble a complete application. We will see
a typical, pure Java application that implements an expandable text editor.
We will also expand the themes outlined in Chapter 4, “Designing for Deployment,” from a
practical viewpoint. We will discuss the practical organization of modules and the overall
deployment illustrating it with this concrete case.
Design
We choose a well-known application domain that fits nicely with the features provided by
JNLP. Our application—that we will call (with great imagination)
Tex t uale
—is easily orga-
nized into a set of software modules, using a functional decomposition of the provided fea-
tures.
For simplicity, we will supply just one of those “add-on” features, a graphical editor for
embedding simple draws in our text. A screenshot of a document processed with our text editor
is proposed in Figure 13.1.
F
IGURE
13.1
Our application at work.
Before we illustrate the implementation of our application, we take the remainder of this sec-
tion to review the mechanisms of JNLP technology. After a recapping digression about JNLP
usage, we will apply the observations found to our particular case.
JNLP support is achieved using the following means:
•JNLP files that organize coherently the resources to be deployed.
• An optional icon that is used both at download time and for integrating the application
on the client platform, depending on JNLP Client's features.
