The Launcher Component

The Launcher Component is designed to be a cross platform Java application launcher.

The original Java classes come from the Tomcat 4.0 project.

Commons-launcher eliminates the need for a batch or shell script to launch a Java class. Some situations where elimination of a batch or shell script may be desirable are:

  • You want to avoid having to determining where certain application paths are e.g. your application's home directory, etc. Determining this dynamically in a Windows batch scripts is very tricky on some versions of Windows or when softlinks are used on Unix platforms.
  • You want to avoid having to handle native file and path separators or native path quoting issues.
  • You need to enforce certain system properties e.g. java.endorsed.dirs when running with JDK 1.4.
  • You want to allow users to pass in custom JVM arguments or system properties without having to parse and reorder arguments in your script. This can be tricky and/or messy in batch and shell scripts.
  • You want to bootstrap system properties from a configuration file instead hard-coding them in your batch and shell scripts.
  • You want to provide localized error messages which is very tricky to do in batch and shell scripts.

Releases

See the downloads page for information on obtaining releases.


Documentation

The JavaDoc API documents are available online.