JLaunch + Sgine

As I mentioned in my previous post I've been working on a simplified deployment system for Java applications and I've made some pretty good strides. To that end I wanted to share my current progress by finally posting a working applet here to show:



Using a bit of JavaScript the applet will launch when you click on the static image. This is still a very early version, but my goal is to release JLaunch as an open-source project that provides a wizard to simplify creating deployments. The system currently supports two methods of launching. The first is a static void main(args) method that it invokes that gives over complete control to display a new Frame or whatever it is configured to do. The second is the referenced class providing a "createCanvas" method that returns a java.awt.Canvas instead that gets put into the applet for you upon instantiation. The latter instance is what is being used in the above example and is implemented by default in StandardDisplay, so any classes that extend that don't even have to think about it.

For example, see the code for the TestImage class being used:

package org.sgine.ui

import org.sgine.core.Resource

import org.sgine.render.Debug
import org.sgine.render.StandardDisplay

object TestImage extends StandardDisplay with Debug {
 def setup() = {
  val component = new Image(Resource("puppies.jpg"))
  scene += component
 }
}

I also inherit Debug which disables vertical-sync and shows the framerate in the top-left of the screen. To sum up, the above two lines of logic can be launched as an application (since StandardDisplay provides a main method that is inherited) or as an applet via JLaunch. Pretty awesome huh? :)

One last noteworthy item is that the jlaunch.jar is 14kb and the pack200 version is a total of 5kb. This, I believe, is a good representation of what the startup time of applets should be.