Maven Webstart Plugin

The Webstart plugin generates application bundles that can be deployed via Web Start. The plugin can be used to prepare standalone webstart applications or webstart apps bundled in WAR files (with or without Sun's Download Servlet). It handles the generation of JNLP files and optional version.xml files, using Velocity templates. It also handles the selection and preparation of the dependencies, performing signing, unsigning and Pack200 compression when required.

Although not yet at version 1.0, the plugin is approaching maturity and can be used in a production environment.

It requires maven 2 (version 2.0.6 or later) to work correctly.

Features

  • JNLP file generation where information is inserted into a user defined Velocity template. Inbuilt default templates.
  • transitive dependencies
    • possibilities to include/exclude dependencies
  • key generation (thanks to the keytool-maven-plugin)
  • jar signing and signing verification
  • unsign already signed jars
  • pack200 support for compressed versions of the jar files resulting in faster network downloads of your webstart application.
  • pluggable API for jar signer

Long time users: upgrading from older releases

Settings are incompatible with 1.0-alpha-1 ! See the upgrade documentation.

New users: getting started

Read the cookbook recipe.

Usage

Instructions on how to use the Maven Webstart Plugin can be found here.

Examples

To provide you with a better understanding of some usages of the Webstart Plugin, the documentation contains several examples. Cf the menu on the left.

Links