[MUD-Dev] java clients

[Daniel James]

On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Matt Mihaly wrote:

> You can check out our new java client at
> www.achaea.com/javaclient/play.html.

Very nice!

> ... [Skotos] ran into a lot of problems with Java, and man was
> [Christopher Allen] right. We have been unable, for instance, to
> enable any sort of copying from the output window into a
> clipboard, and are also unable to log anything to the player's
> computer.

I believe that it's possible for the user to grant permission to
write to the disk to a *signed* Java applet, but they have to do it
every time the applet is run. It probably also depends on the
JVM/Browser combo and the user's security settings.

> This inability alone basically renders Java unsuitable for a
> full-featured text MUD client. (And while I'm not much of a
> programmer, if any of you clever programmers out there have
> figured out good work-arounds for this, I'd love to hear them.)

We're using Java, but we're using Java 1.4 and running the client
completely separately as a standalone application via Java
Webstart. This lets the user grant an application once-off
permission for network and disk access. It also lets them add
desktop icons etc, and manages the download of updates (not
especially efficiently, but it does it). Oh, and you can
cut-and-paste.

Using Java this way gets you away from the jungle of browser JVMs (I
wouldn't try to do a complex application in the browser, the
variations alone will drive you nuts), but comes with penalties --
notably the 9mb Java 1.4 download -- that would probably drive most
folks into platform specificity or even other platforms like
python/tcl.

We're doing it because we're Java fans: we're betting that the
platform independence and other aspects of the language (good
support for code reuse, increasingly good libraries, broad
programmer acceptance) will stand us in good stead, especially when
we come to porting the game to other platforms, making new games, or
open-sourcing our toolkit.

Besides, I'd have to develop new motivational 'therapies' to get my
engineers to write Window$ code. Alas, we will probably have to do a
little of this -- even 1.4 has keyboard manager issues that may end
up needing platform specific code. Break out the rrrum!

Daniel


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