Java Manifest Frustrations

I am a fan of the Java programming language. Tonight was a rare example of when I was not a Java fan. I want to quickly detail what I was doing, and what I needed to do to fix my problem, so that others will not waste the hours that I did.

In summary: I wanted my program to start. Not a big ask, and a somewhat important feature of my application.

My program started fine in my dev environment (so it must be alright!), but when starting from a command line batch script, it failed miserably.

Problem: My classpath was too long. This basically means I was making use of so many external libraries that my command going into the dos-prompt was considerable. So considerable in fact that Windows would not run it.

Mission: To make my command line shorter.

Approach: Simple - simply move my classpath references to external libraries into the manifest of my application .jar file (similar to an .exe file really). This is simple, you write a bit of code like this into the ANT build script, and it's done automagically:

<manifestclasspath property="jar.classpath" jarfile="${web-inf.dir}/libs/${jarFile}">

<classpath refid="classpath" />

</manifestclasspath>

<jar destfile="${web-inf.dir}/libs/${jarFile}" index="yes">

<fileset dir="${build.dir}"/>

<manifest>

<attribute name="Class-Path" value="${jar.classpath}"/>

<attribute name="Main-Class" value="...main class..."/>

</manifest>

</jar>

Excellent. I go to run the program....not so excellent, in fact, it simply couldn't find any external libraries. Of course, I had gotten past the 'line too long' windows 'feature'.

The manifest file being created looked fine, but just to be sure I tried dozens of slight permutations. None worked. I started trawling the internet, for hours, and then I found this. Long story short - that index="yes" above had to be a index="no" for any external library to be discovered and loaded from my manifest. This index option essentially speeds up class loading, so in all regards it seems like a feature most people would have on in their build scripts by default. Surely this means that a large number of people will encounter this problem. I can't see why Sun can't get this right...

Anyway, let this be a lesson to everyone - and especially the future me, when I invariably trip up on this again.