Re: Helpful hint for javakit and windows XP

At 03:04 PM 4/28/2004 +0100, Andy Page wrote:
>I had fun this morning getting javakit to work, previously I had no problems
>running under windows 98.  After sprinkling the java comm bits and pieces in
>the various jdk/jre directories and still not seeing any serial ports I
>finally discovered that having the java default installation directory as
>C:\j2sdk1.4.2_03 doesn't seem to work properly!  Renaming it to C:\java
>cured the problem and hey presto we have serial ports!  It seems that
>underneath, Windows XP is more like NT/DOS and may work better with short
>file/directory names (8+3 format).

I think some programs use the first period as a delimiter and assume that 
what follows is the extension name so in this case the file would be 
assumed to be j2sdk1.4 which is not going to work.

Also some multi-platform programs we use, and the Java tools in general, 
cannot tolerate whitespace in path names, since whitespace is also a 
delimiter between command line arguments. You can pass a name with 
whitespace if you enclose the whole string in quotes, for example:
somejavatoolexe "argument with whitespace" argument1 argument2

Also many tools don't accept other punctuation such as dashes/hyphens in 
path names.

When you think about it, you can't have whitespace in a URL either, and 
slashes are delimiters.

So for your own sanity and portability of your work, follow the Java naming 
conventions in filenames, and then your code should run anywhere - Windoze, 
Max, Linux, Unix, Solaris, etc. Why do it any other way? (Don't ask me why 
Sun uses names like j2sdk1.4.2_03 instead of using underscores or other 
versioning conventions).

Also, on the topic of Java exe paths you might find these 
experiments/musings interesting:
http://www.practicalembeddedjava.com/tools/javapaths.html

Bruce


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