Programming fun at startup

We recently ran into an issue where suddenly customers using Java applet for multi file upload started seeing security warning and the worrying thing about this dialog was the "Block" was the first choice so customers keep on clicking Block. The reason this dialog was coming is that our applet was making a http call to download some properties files and Java applet was treating it as a security warning because Applet jars were signed but the properties file were not and they can't be signed. The fix for this issue was to bundle the properties file in the jar file. Temporarily you can also ask users to enable this setting

Java Applets uses a property called as CACHE_VERSION which is of format 4.0.5.452d that is comprised of 4 hexadecimal values separated by ".". The Applet plug-in uses this to determine whether to download new Jars or not. The sun documentation says that applet plugin would download the new jars if the CACHE_VERSION is higher than the previous one. My findings on this: Windows plugin in IE/FF/Chrome/"Safari on windows" all will download new jars regardless of whether the jar cache version is greater or not. Earlier our version was 4.0.5.XXX, I tried updating version to 4.0.4.XXX or even 1.2.3.XXX and windows would happily download it. We recently ran into an issue where applet would not work fro some mac users and it was random, the culprit was that during one deployment our operations team had updated jar as 4.0.6.XXX and we use XXX as svn changelist number of the jar file so we never changed the "4.0.5" portion. When the new build was deployed the jar...

We use an applet in our website for uploading multiple files/folder tree to the server. Recently we ran into an issue where our code signing certificate was expired and we had to sign the jars again and publish new jars. We use CACHE_VERSION to give each jar a version that way on each browser restart the applet doesn't go to server for checking if a new version is available on the server or not. Refer http://java.sun.com/products/plugin/1.3/docs/appletcaching.html for more details on CACHE_VERSION. We ran into an issue where even after uploading the new jars to the server and giving them each a different CACHE_VERSION customers were still complaining about the expired certificate dialog. Doing some googling found that its a common problem in Java plugins in most browsers and a restart of browser would fix it. The browsers will check the cache version in an open browser only once and then even if you render the applet tag again it wont check the cache version. Wow so many people ...