Re: [gentoo-user] Java apps in 64 bit JVM?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Monday 29 June 2009 18:54:13 Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 9:37 AM, Alan McKinnon<alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>
wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > The company has a Juniper Secure Connect VPN and I run amd64. The process
> > is: log in via a web page in a browser, click a button and the page
> > starts a java APP to create the ssl tunnel - a full blown Swing app, not
> > a mere applet.
> >
> > I've only ever got this Java app to run in 32 bit Firefox with the
> > java-x86- emul package. 64 bit Firefox, Konqueror, Opera all fail. I've
> > tried sun-jdk, sun-jre (nsplugin and nsplugin-2), blackdown and icedtea.
> >
> > The only thing that works is firefox-bin with a 32bit jvm. The app
> > doesn't do much in the way of logging so I don't know why it's failing.
> > This strikes me as odd:
> >
> > A java app is bytecode that is independent of platform. It should make no
> > difference whether a 32bit or 64bit jvm executes the bytecode as the
> > format of the Java Virtual Machine and it's bytecode is constant.
> >
> > Surely?
>
> Alan,
>    I can only echo your frustrations. I don't have a 64-bit Windows
> installation to test but I've run into numerous web sites that make
> use of Java and never found an installation for my 64-bit Gentoo that
> works as well as my wife's 32-bit Gentoo. Maybe things work perfectly
> fine on both machines but numerous ones fail on mine and when tested
> on my wife's seem to work fine. Things like buttons, selection check
> marks, stock charts and other things that specific sites were doing in
> Java tended to be where I had trouble.
>
>    Along these lines was part of the reason I posed a question some
> weeks ago on the Gentoo-64-bit list about the possibility of using a
> 64-bit kernel but building all apps as 32-bit. (Not my idea - picked
> it up on LKML.)
>
>    Good luck and keep us posted. I hope you make progress.

I'm thinking it must be something in Juniper's ncsvc app - judging by the 
quality of their install and launch scripts, I'd rate their programmer's skill 
on par with chimpanzee's for the most part. I'd understand a traditional 
applet - it runs in the browser's process space and all sorts of things could 
conflict. But this is just a regular app (I can kill Firefox as soon as the 
VPN is up and ncsvn continues as normal).

I'm now going to search for options to make this thing log more and better. 
Let's see what happens.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com