Release notes for Commons-Launcher 1.1

Launcher was imported into jakarta commons almost 2 years ago (25 okt 2002) but never had a release.

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

The original Java classes come from the Jakarta Tomcat 4.0 project.

Tomcat has been shipping the 1.0-dev version from CVS for a while now (definitely more than a year), so this official release will be labaled 1.1 to avoid confusion.

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.

For more information consult the Commons-Launcher website.