Hi, Piero.
Thanks for writing down your thoughts on this.
Your suggestions are very much in line with some of what I have been planning for a long time to enhance the Java Web Start app client launching performance. In the original implementation for Java Web Start support we needed to impose as little additional logic as possible, compared to what the server was already doing for the appclient script case. That meant we needed to use the existing "fat" generated app client JAR, and there just has not been time or people to improve that during V2.
Looking ahead to GlassFish V3 there are quite a few possible improvements. You have mentioned some that we have had on the drawing board for some time. There are others that will take advantage of the modular approach we are planning for GlassFish itself in V3, server and client side, which should shrink the client-side footprint of the app client container quite a bit which should also improve the Java Web Start download and start-up performance.
In the V2 timeframe we can look at some smaller fixes - similar to the one I mentioned with Issue 3701 - but we might not have much of a chance to make radical improvements until V3. There are improvements in Java Web Start in Java SE 6 that take full advantage of indexed JAR files, which we could also consider using.
All along we need to keep in mind that GlassFish V2 (and perhaps V3) needs to work in Java SE 5 environments. We can try to take advantage of Java SE 6 features where we can, but not in a way that causes problems with the Java SE 5 runtime in place.
Anyway, I'm glad to hear that the possible workaround described in Issue 3701 would work for you. Stay tuned!
- Tim
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