Update Mechanisms

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned how cool Java Webstart is (or more specifically, JNLP) but I’d not thought about how other technologies achieve the same thing.  Martin Pool apparently has (hint: he’s using yum).  JNLP has the advantage that it includes security concepts (sandboxing in particular) and that it checks for updates each time the program is run rather than only when the user runs the updater.

Having said that though, JNLP needs to include finer grained specifications for security privilege requests (currently it’s essentially applet, servlet or full permissions) as well as the ability to turn off automatic checks for updates (or specify that the user can decide).  Currently though JNLP is excellent for deploying applications within corporate infrastructure and pretty good for deploying to outside customers.

Yum of course has the advantage that it can work well with programs written in any language and not just Java.  Conceptually I think you could make WebStart (the most common implementation of JNLP) work with non-Java programs but you’d get none of the benefits from it so it’s really just academic.