Today I looked into Java Web Start a little and tried out netx using gcj. The demo
program worked just fine, which surprised me a bit. For those not in
the know, Java Web Start is a simple way to download (and cache) and
run java applications. As I understand it, you write a little “.jnlp”
file describing the application, then there is a generic local
launcher that interprets these, and then downloads and executes the
bits.

I think this will end up working well as a side effect of the
security work that is needed for the Mozilla plugin. A couple nice
additional tweaks would be first, hacking netx to gcj-compile the jars
it caches, and second, packaging this nicely in the distro so that
jnlp links work in Mozilla, it is trivial to make jnlp-based desktop
launchers, etc. Neither of these seems very hard.