On: Java is preparing to co-bundling and native binari...

[bni]

Yes, that is a bit better than Windows, were this functionality would have mattered the most to have from the beginning.

Still, its not 100% the way OS X users expect apps to work.

[darklajid → bni]

You seem to be under the impression that Windows doesn't do the same. That's wrong.

Windows does the same thing as OS X. You can do the same on Linux, even on the console over there (using binfmt_misc, see [1]) without a desktop environment.

For as long as I can remember Java installed an entry in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT for .jar files. On my machine it's currently set up to run

  "C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin\javaw.exe" -jar "%1" %*

whenever I want to 'launch' a jar file.

1: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1667830/running-a-jar-fil...

[jsight → darklajid]

The biggest problem that I've seen is that on Windows apps sometimes steal this association. I used to tell users to do this to launch Java applications, but it was surprising how many times they would end up in WinZip or some other Zip handling application.

Java does try to get that to work by default, though.

[freehunter → jsight]

File compression utilities really do go way overboard on what they want to open as zipped files. Installing one usually means having to uncheck maybe half the defaults because they're more commonly used as regular file formats.