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The Java start button displays a menu of Java programs that can be downloaded and run from the internet just by selecting them in the menu.  They run in a single Java Virtual Machine so they start instantly and take very little memory compared to normal Java programs.  

This program was written primarily as a GUI demo of the netx JNLP client I wrote, so there are missing features and the UI is fairly limited.  However, it is still fun to see it work and a great demonstration of the potential for network-based applications and JNLP.


 Picture of the Java Start Menu

Click image to run with Java Web Start.

When you run the program it will display a small button in the upper left corner of your screen that you can use like the Windows start menu, as shown above.  The screenshot shows an early version of the menu with only about 50 applications listed, but the program itself and the application list is updated from the internet so it can always have the latest Java applications listed.

The Java Start Button downloads programs and resources from the internet using a load-balanced multi-threaded download, so even if a huge program with many resources is downloading you can still start up small programs very fast.  Below is a screenshot of it downloading two resources for the Tejina application.  The default setup allows it to download five resources at once, or one at a time if requested to load resources in the background.  Because it will take some time to download icons and verify the applications, the menus may appear disabled for a few moments.


 download picture

The core of the program is a Java Network Launching Protocol (JNLP) client that I've written called netx.  It can be included in any program to load Java code into a virtual machine and run it in a secure environment with process management (dispose windows and stop threads when application exits).  Click here for more information on netx.

To run the Java Start Button you can open it with Java Web Start, or download the netx JNLP client and open the link using that (double-click the .jar file).  Java Start Button requires Java version 1.3 or later to run.