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<document>
   <properties>
      <title>Release notes for Commons-Launcher 1.1</title>
      <author email="commons-dev@jakarta.apache.org">Commons Documentation Team</author>
      <revision>$Id: release-notes-1.1.xml,v 1.2 2004/08/22 11:24:05 dirkv Exp $</revision>
   </properties>

   <body>
     <section name="Release notes for Commons-Launcher 1.1">
<p>
Launcher was imported into jakarta commons almost 2 years ago (25 okt 2002) but never had a release. 
</p>

<p>The Launcher Component is designed to be a cross platform Java
application launcher.</p>
<p>The original Java classes come from the Jakarta Tomcat 4.0 project.</p>
<p>
Tomcat has been shipping the 1.0-dev version from CVS for a while now
(definitely more than a year), so this official release will be labaled 1.1
to avoid confusion.
</p>

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<p>
Commons-launcher eliminates the need for a batch or shell script to launch a 
Java class. Some situations where elimination of a batch or shell script may 
be desirable are:
<ul>
  <li>You want to avoid having to determining where certain application paths
  are e.g. your application's home directory, etc. Determining this
  dynamically in a Windows batch scripts is very tricky on some versions of
  Windows or when softlinks are used on Unix platforms.</li>
  <li>You want to avoid having to handle native file and path separators or
  native path quoting issues.</li>
  <li>You need to enforce certain system properties e.g.
  <code>java.endorsed.dirs</code> when running with JDK 1.4.</li>
  <li>You want to allow users to pass in custom JVM arguments or system
  properties without having to parse and reorder arguments in your script.
  This can be tricky and/or messy in batch and shell scripts.</li>
  <li>You want to bootstrap system properties from a configuration file instead
  hard-coding them in your batch and shell scripts.</li>
  <li>You want to provide localized error messages which is very tricky to do
  in batch and shell scripts.</li>
  </ul>
</p>
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<p>
For more information consult the 
<a href="http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/launcher/">Commons-Launcher website</a>.
</p>
</section>
</body>
</document>

