AppletLoader and versioning

[bobjob]

I was thinking in order to greatly decrease the download times of general applet use.

Is it possible to somehow install the LWJGL specific jars and natives into a non-domain directory taking into account the latest version. so that lwjgl applets will be treaded more like plugins and not need to download the exact copies of jar files that are signed with the LWJGL certificate every time into different folders.

[kappa]

Is it possible to somehow install the LWJGL specific jars and natives into a non-domain directory taking into account the latest version. so that lwjgl applets will be treaded more like plugins and not need to download the exact copies of jar files that are signed with the LWJGL certificate every time into different folders.

yes have a look at the following parameter in the AppletLoader.

<!-- whether to prepend host to cache path - defaults to true -->
<param name="al_prepend_host" value="false">

Just use the same al_title for all the applets with the above parameter and they will all share the same cache from any domain. Also have a read of the AppletLoader Tutorial for some more clarification on it.


Lately though, I have been thinking if there is a good way to extend this functionality.

One way it could be done is that jars are downloaded into folders based on the domain/url they came from (instead of on al_title + the domain of where the appletloader jars is on). This way it'd save time and any lwjgl applet would only ever have to download files once. It would also mean we could eliminate the need for the al_title tag altogether.

There are certain things that do worry me though about the above approach, for example if a jar is downloaded and becomes corrupt, all applets depending on that would fail forever (until that file is deleted or redownloaded). Also the other issue would be load on the LWJGL server, does it really have the capacity to support all games leeching from it? if for example a game using them became super popular (think slashdot or reddit or even minecraft!) it could go down. Also if the LWJGL server went down it'd also break all games depending on it. Suppose you could argue that it'd have less load then the current method.

[bobjob]

So it seems if all LWJGL default jars were downloaded into a standardised path, it would create more of a head-ache if something was to go wrong. I guess the current way is the best, as internet speeds only increase as time goes by. LWJGL applets are still not very popular so I guess it doesnt really matter yet.