Dependency on 3rd party at runtime?

Question

We have created an applet with javafx and it seems that in order to load the applet several jar, jnlp and js files are required to be downloaded from dl.javafx.com. I tried to work out which files were needed so I could host them on our own server but after spending an hour or so on it I got tired of reading code and gave up. Doesn't it seem bizarre that to use javafx the client has a dependency on the javafx server? There was an instance a few months ago where their server was down which is completely unacceptable. I feel like scrapping it and starting again in something else but I can't throw a years work away.

What are everyone else's views? Have you experienced/solved this? Any suggestions where I should go from here will be gratefully accepted.

Answer 1

This issue has come up a few times and it is one of the main gripes people have with JavaFX. There is a dependency on the runtime, however I believe it is technically possible to distribute an app "offline" (though I've never tried it). See here and here.

I am not sure whether or not it is a breach of the license to distribute offline.

I have sympathy with your frustration, but I would argue that it would not be worth scrapping a year's work. I imagine the uptime of the Oracle servers would be no worse than any outage that could be expected of any web application.