[BiO BB] Robustness of Java Webstart

[Dr. Christoph Gille]

Dear Community,


In the last 6 Months, two different users reported a technical problem
to start the STRAP viewer developed by myself on a Mac OSX
computer. Unfortunately, I cannot reproduce this problem.

Posting to the PDB_L forum, all 9 people who responded, could
not reproduce the problem either.

It might be, that there is a bug in STRAP and that this bug is
tolerated in 98% of the cases but occasionally shows up. It might also
be that particular Java installations exhibit a bug and do not cope
with certain webstart parameter.

My hope is to identify the problem with the help of this broader
forum.  This might be useful for other Java projects as well.

I would like you to try to start the STRAP program with one of the
following links. This will open STRAP and display a PDB entry. It
requires Java 1.5 or higher. If the Browser asks what todo with jnlp
files, then tell him to open it the
../bin/javaws program of the Java installation.

   http://www.bioinformatics.org/strap/lite/strap.php?load=PDB:1gd2
   http://www.bioinformatics.org/strap/lite/strap.php?load=PDB:1ryp
   http://www.bioinformatics.org/strap/lite/strap.php?load=PDB:2wbs


The STRAP viewer is safe, it has a built in security check and can
only write/modify files to the directory $HOME/.StrapAlign or
C:\StrapAlign on Windows. No other files are modified. You do not need
to worry about security.

Here are the official Java-Webstart demos for testing whether Java is
set-up properly:

   http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/desktop/javawebstart/demos.html



Can you please drop a short message to christoph.gille (a) charite.de
telling whether it worked or not and  what operation system and what
kind of Java you have.


For those who are interested in more exciting examples of STRAP:

  http://www.bioinformatics.org/strap/PDF/strapI.php?year=2003&document=PMID12595256&link=2
  http://www.bioinformatics.org/strap/PDF/strapI.php?year=2003&document=PMID12595256&link=1

Many thanks

Christoph