Presents your 
JAVA E-NEWSLETTER for February 24, 2003

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GENERATE LAUNCH SCRIPTS FOR YOUR APPLICATIONS

If you use an IDE to write most of your Java programs, then you've
probably experienced the frustration of moving your application from
development to testing, to QA, to production, etc.

Here's a typical situation: Your application requires a couple of jar
files just to start and another 10 to do its work. If your app is running
inside a container, your work isn't that difficult; but if your
application is a stand-alone, you know how frustrating it can be to set 
up your launch scripts.

There are applications that solve this problem, but bringing in a
third-party application to launch your applications is often overkill. 
An easy resolution is to write a small program to build your launch scripts
for you.

A small application, com.code316.core.LaunchScriptBuilder, will build a
launch script for an application based on a properties file.
http://www.code316.com/sourcecore/docs/apidocs/com/code316/core/LaunchScriptBuilder.html

To get started, create a file like the following:

main=com.code316.bunny.Bunny lib=deploy/lib/

The main property is the name of the application's startup class. The
lib property is the name of the directory that contains the application's
jar/zip files. The application scans the lib directory and appends each
jar/zip file found there to the application's classpath.

Now execute the application with the properties file as a command line
argument, and it will print your launch script to a standard output. 
You can redirect this output into the file of your choice.

The properties file lets you generate scripts that will run on Windows
and UNIX operating systems:

java -cp code316-core-.4.jar com.code316.core.LaunchScriptBuilder
launch.properties

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