Generate Custom drjava.jar

Mathias Ricken — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:32:26 -0000

There have been some requests (I believe from the media computation people at Georgia Tech; http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/mediaComp-plan/101 ) for a feature that can generate a customized DrJava jar file that already includes user-specified jar libraries.

This functionality would take the current DrJava jar (it should work with EXE and Mac applications too) and add a number of user-specified jar files to it. Then it will write out a new drjava.jar file. The libraries included in the new jar file will then automatically be included in the classpath and be usable without adding them to a classpath somewhere. It will ONLY write a jar file, not an EXE file or a Mac application.

There is no functionality to remove the libraries again.

Issues to consider:
1. We should probably disable automatic updates for modified drjava.jar files. Otherwise a user may download an updated version that doesn't have required libraries anymore.
2. We should check whether an added library interferes with a class already included in DrJava.
3. What kind of debugging information can we print out to distinguish a modified version from an original version?

Recent changes to 378: Generate Custom drjava.jar

Generate Custom drjava.jar