All That Jazz
Apr. 9th, 2026 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
billroperGretchen got her wisdom tooth out today. I shortly need to go pick up her prescriptions from Walgreens, but one of the four prescriptions didn't go through, so we have made some phone calls and maybe when I go down to check in with her, she will know that the prescription is ready. I hope. :)
Meanwhile, K wrote a project in Java using IntelliJ. I wish that she had picked VSCode and the Java extensions there for an IDE, because I've *seen* that IDE before. Anyway, this honors project involved building a sort of choose your own adventure game. The trick was getting it off of her computer and into a form that someone else could run.
My Google Fu is strong, but this was one heckuva little problem to sort out. I managed to find out how to get IntelliJ to build a JAR file that included all of the Swing components that K had used in building the game. Now, if you had a matching installed version of Java on your machine, you could double click on the JAR file and get the game to run.
Did I mention that K's machine does not have a matching installed version of Java? I managed to get IntelliJ to tell me which version of the OpenJDK it is using (26!) and then we downloaded that and installed it. This gave me access to the JPackage utility, which is used to bind a JAR file together with a matching JRE so that you can run the JAR file. This is a trick that I had planned to investigate someday at work for one of my stalled projects. Well, I won't be doing that for work, but I would be doing it today, because I am a minor programming deity. (Ok, if you have done this before and you are working on your own machine, this may be fairly simple. If you are working on your child's computer over Zoom and have never had to use this trick before, it's a bit more complex.)
I managed to get everything correctly typed into the command line to launch JPackage. This involved, among other things, downloading a copy of 7Zip so that I could peer into the contents of the JAR file and make sure that I was providing the correct class name. Ok, it's -- not running. It wants the WIX toolkit.
I have never used the WIX toolkit. I found it, downloaded it, and installed it. Let's try that again.
Look! It's an EXE file. Run it!
A dialog comes up and goes through some steps and goes away. Ok.
It eventually dawns on me that I've built an installer. Let's look over here. Yes, there is the installed application. Let's try running *that*.
And the game popped up on the screen.
And there was much rejoicing. Right after we ate Sir Robin's minstrels.
Yay, Dad!
Meanwhile, K wrote a project in Java using IntelliJ. I wish that she had picked VSCode and the Java extensions there for an IDE, because I've *seen* that IDE before. Anyway, this honors project involved building a sort of choose your own adventure game. The trick was getting it off of her computer and into a form that someone else could run.
My Google Fu is strong, but this was one heckuva little problem to sort out. I managed to find out how to get IntelliJ to build a JAR file that included all of the Swing components that K had used in building the game. Now, if you had a matching installed version of Java on your machine, you could double click on the JAR file and get the game to run.
Did I mention that K's machine does not have a matching installed version of Java? I managed to get IntelliJ to tell me which version of the OpenJDK it is using (26!) and then we downloaded that and installed it. This gave me access to the JPackage utility, which is used to bind a JAR file together with a matching JRE so that you can run the JAR file. This is a trick that I had planned to investigate someday at work for one of my stalled projects. Well, I won't be doing that for work, but I would be doing it today, because I am a minor programming deity. (Ok, if you have done this before and you are working on your own machine, this may be fairly simple. If you are working on your child's computer over Zoom and have never had to use this trick before, it's a bit more complex.)
I managed to get everything correctly typed into the command line to launch JPackage. This involved, among other things, downloading a copy of 7Zip so that I could peer into the contents of the JAR file and make sure that I was providing the correct class name. Ok, it's -- not running. It wants the WIX toolkit.
I have never used the WIX toolkit. I found it, downloaded it, and installed it. Let's try that again.
Look! It's an EXE file. Run it!
A dialog comes up and goes through some steps and goes away. Ok.
It eventually dawns on me that I've built an installer. Let's look over here. Yes, there is the installed application. Let's try running *that*.
And the game popped up on the screen.
And there was much rejoicing. Right after we ate Sir Robin's minstrels.
Yay, Dad!