Hi Gregg, Distributing little apps as JARs indeed doesn't work well anymore out of the box, but it doesn't have to be the end of the line for them. I've spent a couple of years writing a tool designed explicitly to solve all these problems [1]. You give Conveyor your JARs (or a Maven/Gradle build), it'll create and upload self-updating packages for Windows, Mac and Linux that bundle a jlinked and minified JVM, fully signed and notarized, along with a download HTML page for end users to get a big green button. It'll even draw an icon for you. You can do this from any OS, you don't need Windows or macOS to ship for them.
This approach has the major downside that unless your app is open source it's not free (we gotta make money somehow) BUT if you can put that to one side, it works better than the JAR era ever could: - No Java compatibility issues by design. - Not blocked by browsers/operating system security. - Apps can update more smoothly than Web Start ever allowed. - You can use OS specific integrations. - Clean uninstalls, native code handled better and so on. You might object that this is somehow more effort than just making a fat jar and sending it to people, but in practice it's not harder. You run it, out pops a bunch of files, you make them available to people, done. W.R.T. corporate deployment, note that Conveyor makes MSIX files which are Microsoft's official format and easily deployed across Windows networks. The difficulty with the send-a-JAR approach is that maintaining backwards compatibility at the level you want (Win32, web level) takes a massive level of spend, a large library of public programs which can be automatically regression tested against, and a commitment to never break anything even if it seriously disadvantages later developers, and even then things will still break despite best intentions. Decades ago this tradeoff made more sense because bandwidth and storage space were much tighter, but now it's harder to justify. That's why so few platforms do it anymore. [1] https://hydraulic.software/
