Faster Java WebStart startup times?

[peterls]

Hi,

We've been experimenting with the Java WebStart deployment and everything works fine except startup times are prohibitively long.

This is caused by the fact that all the jars are downloaded eagerly every time, and then compared to the installed version (or re-installed) even if there has been no change since the last install.

Is it possible for the WebStart build process to create a build identifier file (maybe a simple, random guid) and that at startup only that file is downloaded eagerly, and checked against the copy of the locally installed version? Then of course if they're different the rest can be downloaded too and updated.

Thanks in advance,
Peter

[adrian]

Hi,

What you're describing shouldn't happen in normal operation. Last I checked, the jars are only downloaded the first time the JWS deployment is started. Subsequent starts take just a few seconds to check for changes and start immediately if no differences have been found. If there are some differences, only these are re-downloaded.

We actually have a readily available JWS deployment on our download page. Could you please test with this and see if it performs the same for you?
http://www.oxygenxml.com/download_oxyge ... vaWebStart

Regards,
Adrian

[peterls]

Hi Adrian,

Yes, you were right. Network packet capturing revealed it was the web server I used that silently added some HTTP header fields to all the responses, disabling client-side caching.

Sorry for the thread, I should've investigated more thoroughly.