Java SE (Java Platform, Standard Edition)

I deploy a free Java application for academic users. Most of my users
have Linux in an Intranet environment. Often, the users have little
computer knowledge and do not exactly know what "Web-proxy" means.

This seems to be a difficult constellation for javaws since
Java-Webs-tart is often not able to obtain the browser Proxy setting
automatically.

However under Windows and Mac the users experienced less problems.
Sometimes it helps to configure the proxy also for IE even if the user
is normally using Firefox and never using IE. Under Linux I managed to define
Firefox as default browser such that javaws can use the Proxy
settings. I tried the same with konqueror without success.


A more general method seems to set the proxy in the control panel of
java. There are two possible GUI programs to open the control panel: Sometimes
there is a program with the rather unspecific name "ControlPanel" and
sometimes there is javacpl. I do not know whether these are the only
possible names. I like "javacpl" because the name indicates that it
has something to do with java and "cpl" looks like "control panel".

To my opinion it would be nice if Javaws could come up with a message
box in case the download fails. There could be the possibility to use the
open the Control Panel for proxy configuration per click. Currently,
javaws fails and displays an ugly Exception and users may think that the
error is in my application. Concerning a message to be displayed in
case of failure, I did not find something in the jnlp specification.


Javaws could probe the proxy settings from the browser[s]
automatically. It could iterate through the settings of opera,
Firefox, konqueror, iceweasel, epiphany ... and probe the proxy
settings of these browsers until it finds a setting that works. Being
a child process of a specific browser it could also find out what
browser it was started from and start probing with the settings of
this particular browser.

What are your experiences with users within an Intranet environment?

How do you enable the "naive" users to use your Webstart application?
What kind of documentation on Web-proxy setting do you provide on your
Web-sites? Should we submit a request for feature for "automatic proxy detection by javaws"?