Suppose you have developed your Java application and distributed it to your users. If all goes well, the application just works on every computer. But if there's a problem, you have to begin troubleshooting. Users will call for all sorts of installation problems, expecting you to fix them. Moreover, the same problems will often come back: the wrong version of Java, a deleted file, too-restrictive file permissions, etc. Most of these problems can be solved by creating a checklist. However, instead of wasting time asking new users the same questions on the checklist over and over, you can create a diagnostic test that goes through the checklist, providing users with the information they need to solve the problem. If users can't solve the problem themselves, they can show you a clear checklist, so you can take a look at what's going wrong without asking a bunch of questions first.
What problems can users expect? First, things can already go wrong during the installation process if the user doesn't follow the installation instructions accurately. Even if the installation succeeds, problems can appear later. Changes in configuration (like the
JAVA_HOME environment variable) or changes in the directory structure can indeed break things. In this article, we will develop an Ant script to run diagnostic tests for a Java application. We will look at a list of possible problems and how to deal with them. For our approach to work, Ant has to be installed on the user's machine. This may mean that your installer will have to provide Ant.The article gets you through all kinds of environmenttest:
- Write out a checklist of the systemenvironment
- Check nessesary folders and required classes
- Task for checking minimum JDK-version
- MD5-checksum for configurationfiles and classes
- Restore original configuration
