FlashForward 2006

Quote:

Mind you, the Java folks have had similar capabilities to this for quite some time with the JAR file, but the whole double-clickable JAR app thing really never caught on (except for J2ME), mainly because Java/Sun never bothered to enable it, and if you want to make a double-clickable Java app you have to set it up manually or make a non-cross-platform launcher for your app. . .which is why Eclipse requires a dozen-or-so system-specific installers despite it being written in a "cross platform" language. . .but I digress.

Actually there are several cross platform installers for Java, the most commonly used is probably InstallAnywhere. It also creates launchers that are executables (.exe on Windows, app bundle on OS X, executable binary on Linux/unix).

Granted, InstallAnywhere is a finicky POS with all sorts of annoying, though not by any means fatal, bugs and misfeatures. Still and all, it works for us (headaches not withstanding), and we ship our software for Windows, Win 64 bit, Linux, Linux 64 bit, AIX, Linux PPC, Solaris, Solaris x86 and OS X.

None of this takes anything away from Apollo, which does indeed sound interresting. I just wanted to correct the mistaken idea that Java can't do roughly the same thing.