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How does versioning work in the Ant Web Start Task?

April 26, 2017Ant Task Versioning web

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How does versioning work in the Ant Web Start Task?

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One of the main advantages of Java Web Start is the ability to version jar files, allowing users to only download thoses jars that have changed. Versioning support in the Ant Web Start Task is pretty minimal; the original timestamp of the jar file is preserved in the WAR archive, which means that the client Web Start deployer will decide whether a user’s jars need updating based on its timestamp. This is not very convenient for multi-developer environments where more than one developer can create and deploy the WAR archive. Moreover, the Ant Web Start Task does not keep older versions of updated jars, and so jar-diffing is not supported. There are no plans to support this in the future; this kind of functionality is difficult to achieve as part of the build process. If you need this kind of functionality, it would be easiest to roll out a custom JNLP file and application archive and maintain them manually.