Understanding The Manifest
I decided to do some review this afternoon after seeing a couple tutorials on java.sun.com that I thought would be a good idea to go over
The most educational so far has been the JAR Trail, which filled in several gaps in my knowledge. The Understanding the Manifest section was the most interesting mentioning the "download extension" mechanism that I didn't realize existed. I've always wondered how some Java .jar apps seem to know where everything it needs is located! Cool beans.
I'm sure there'll be an Ant task to add this info into my jar file, and since I always add all the jars I need to my projects so they run without problems, that'll mean "bye bye batch files"! I'm going through much of this process because I want the app I'm writing to be downloadable by WebStart, and that means everything needs to be inside .jar files, even .dlls and xml docs, etc. Learning more about the Jar helps this whole process. (Oooh. the JarClassLoader class neato!).
Every time I go through documentation, I probably throw 75% away as "not needed right now" and then later wonder how some basic stuff works. That's why I like studying for certifications because it really forces you to learn everything the first time through so you don't have as many gaps in your knowledge later.
-Russ