How can I create a jar launcher in java?

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Hello all,
I have created a nice java application.
What I want to do now, is create a separate application, that allows you to select a jar file, from your filesystem, and then press a button, and open it.

I want the application to work on Mac, and PC.

Now I know the ability to click and open is available with Swing applications, however, console applications cannot be double clicked to open (AFAIK).

I also know that I can create a *.bat (Windows) or *.sh (Mac) file that opens to jar, but I want to practice Java some more, and would like to learn how to do this.

Thank you all,

Gigabyte Giant

Posted 27-Jan-14 8:50am

Gigabyte Giant

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pasztorpisti · Answer 1 · 2014-01-27T12:59:00

On windows there are two executables in the jre to run java applications: java and javaw. The main differenc is that java is a console application while javaw isn't, it is usually used to execute gui applications. If you click a jar file in windows then usually javaw is started because the java installer associates jar files with the "javaw -jar %1" command where %1 is the clicked jar file.

Running a jar file with console:

java -jar jarfile

without console:

javaw -jar jarfile

Detecting the location of the java or javaw programs can be tricky, probably one crossplatform way is looking for the JAVA_HOME env var but it isn't necessarily set. On the other hand a machine can have several versions of the jre installed, most java development IDEs ask you to select one of them for your project. I don't know how to detect all of them and this can be platform specific, see google if you are interested about this...

If your launcher program is also a java application then you can find out the directory of the jre by looking at the environment variables of your running launcher application. For example:

Java

String jre_dir = System.getProperty("java.home");

Then you can run the console version of the java program from this jre folder to execute the selected jar file (with the "jre_dir/bin/java -jar your_jar" command).