In the example you have this javafx splash screen example where user launches delegate.jar and it downloads updates and launches business app.

I have build something similar; I have separate Updater app which also functions as installer with javafx gui using update4j-1.2.2.jar, running update logic in different thread and a CustomUpdateHandler updating javafx gui as it goes while showing user info on the currently downloading updates, then after update logic is finished, separate business app in run new jvm and updater does System.exit(0);

I'm wondering if this is an OK way to do it or should I implement it in an other way? Since the updater logic already does an javafx launch I can no longer use Configuration.launch after that am I rite?

Also I'm still a bit unclear on what needs to be done if the updater app itself requires updates, since the updaterapp jar will be locked while it is running.

Runtime run = Runtime.getRuntime(); Process process = run.exec("java -jar BUSINESSAPP.jar"); System.exit(0);

Maintainer's Note

If you bump into this issue, this will happen when javafx.web is dynamically loaded in the business application after config.launch(). This is a bug in the JavaFX web engine; you can track progress here.

Possible workarounds are:

• Load javafx.web statically on the JVM bootstrap classloader. You shouldn't load it dynamically via update4j's loading mechanism in config.launch().
• Load it dynamically, and both the bootstrap and the business apps share the same classloader. You should set DynamicClassLoader as the system classloader, as explained in the wiki. This won't work with modules though.
• Instead of launching via config.launch() start a new JVM as the launch point.

Original Post

As the title says, whenever my business application tries to use a WebView from javafx.web, the application crashes producing a hs_err_pid_xxx.log thread dump file. The javafx-web module is loaded dynamically in the module path by update4j (along with the rest of the javafx modules, which have no issues whatsoever). I know update4j is to blame, since everything works fine if I launch the exact same business application directly. I am running OpenJDK 13.0.1+9 with JavaFX 15-ea+1 on a Mac. Any ideas?

Hello,

looking at the code, it looks like update4j expects all files to be downloaded to be publicly available.

Unfortunately, this is not an option for us. Our files need to be protected using OAuth 2.0 (or OpenID Connect). Because of this I am currently searching for a way to inject a custom "Authrorization" header for update4j to use when downloading any files.

I have written a little library that can be used (for example as a Service with a ServiceLoader) to retrieve the access token as a String. Update4j then only needs to dynamically load and call the service to retrieve the access token and can then use it as the Authorization header.

Using this method, update4j would be agnostic about the authentication method to use. What do you think?

Maybe it can even be abstracted further to allow the inclusion of any custom http headers, not just Authentication.

I would like to try update4j, but the current documentation is not enough to know where to start.

A demo application + launcher code (like fxlauncher) for each way to use the library would go a long way to drive adoption of this library.

We have update4j up and running and everything works nicely beside some classloader issues. Currently these 3pps does not work without some kind of workaround:

• Spring
• XStream
• Koloboke

Before loading the spring application context, which basically instantiate classes, we have to set the current classloader on the thread like this to workaround NoClassDefs:

Thread.currentThread().setContextClassLoader(tmpClassLoader);

the tmpClassLoader in the above case is taken from an already loaded class.

For XStream we have to do something similar, take the classloader from an already loaded class like this:

XStream xStream = new XStream();
xStream.setClassLoader(XStreamFactory.class.getClassLoader());

For Koloboke we haven't figured out how to handle it.

If we look inside the koloboke code we see this:

private static class DefaultFactoryHolder {
	private static final HashIntObjMapFactory defaultFactory =
			ServiceLoader.load(HashIntObjMapFactory.class).iterator().next();
}

and when we look at JDK 11s ServiceLoader.load method, we see that the classloader is fetched like this:

@CallerSensitive
public static <S> ServiceLoader<S> load(Class<S> service) {
	ClassLoader cl = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader();
	return new ServiceLoader(Reflection.getCallerClass(), service, cl);
}

Digger deeper, if the current threads context classloader is null the ServiceLoader will use the system classloader:

if (cl == null) {
	cl = ClassLoader.getSystemClassLoader();
}

All issues essentially have the same problem, getting the context classloader is either null or returns a classloader that is not controlled by update4j.

There must be a more generic way to do this. Can we configure update4j to make sure all returned classloaders are "valid" in the sense that they are controlled by update4j? Can we force each new thread to have update4js classloader when invoking:

Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader()

We are using update4j 1.44, AdoptOpenJDK 11.0.5 On the boot classpath we have 2 jar files: update4j and our custom boot lib, then we get the rest using the config.

If we run without update4j (using a common classpath) everythings works.

Hello Mordechaim,

I am a programming novice (at best) and I've been tasked with implementing automatic updates with update4j. I have no idea on how to make update4j ignore files which are older than the downloaded and installed version of the application. Is there any way to do this?

When the destination directory cannot be written to (read-only or insufficient rights), an error is thrown and the temporary directory isn't cleaned up. Any subsequent update attempt will make it grow.

Perhaps the temporary directory could be cleaned before any update attempt?

Hi, I am just trying to wrap my head around how to get this working and I am stuck at the following:

My modular JavaFX application requires some --add-exports, --add-opens and --add-reads java runtime parameters to operate properly.

Since the bootstrap application does not (and, as I understand it, should not) have any of the --add-xxx target modules in the module path when it is executed, I get "unknown module" warnings once I run it and, of course, "cannot access ..." exceptions when the time comes to run the business application and use those overrides.

Since the whole point is to run the business application on the same process as the bootstrap application and since there is no apparent way to inject --add-xxx directives on a running jvm instance, I am at a dead end.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hey :) I have been playing around with the DefaultBootstrap and file deletion. File deletion is working great, but if I am starting the launcher without making any changes to the files, the method "getOldFiles" is called and checks EVERY file that is contained in both the new and old config, if it is the same:

                if (Files.isSameFile(newFile.getPath(), file.getPath())) {
                    continue outer;
                }

Is this supposed to happen? It delays the start of my program for about a minute or so. I would argue that only the differences in the old and new config are relevant here

org.update4j.Configuration.java, line 1644

Hi,

Previously we used fxlauncher in our javafx application with java 8. Unfortunately fxlauncher can not be used with java 11 so we plan to use your update4j because it is compatible with java 11. I downloaded the demo project and I could run it successfully but I did not find the solution to use custom launcher window. I would like to update our application as I you demonstrated in your JavaFX section of your documentation (Update Splash Screen). How can I implement this behaviour? Can you give me some instructions?

Thanks and regards, Attila Vincze

Hi I'm doing some changes to update4j for our use.

We have an guiapplication that is now run as an applet... obviously we are moving away from this. There are about 300 users. They usually say, "it's not working", which will of course generate many unnecessary problem tickets

I need to show some more info for users when things go wrong. The theory is to show some more output and then show errors in window. The users can then copy the error and send in as an issue.

Typically get an error that the server is down (we distribute the application from the server as well) so a connect exception will trigger a dialog saying that the server is down and so on

I did this previously by copying DefaultBootstrap and then wrote some logging to system.err (to catch exceptions). After upgrade your update to 1.4.5, I forked update4j and made some changes directly.

I also added some testing and related modules for this.

Anyways, have a look and see if this is something you would consider to merge. This is just a preview so if you find it interesting, let me know and I'll put some more effort into it, for a future possible merge. I can also then incorporate your feedback /sear