web development helpdesk

The Desktop class was added in Java 6 to handle launching associated applications on the native desktop.

Following shows how to launch the associated editor application and open a file for editing.

File file = new File("/tmp/file.txt");
Desktop desktop = Desktop.getDesktop();
desktop.edit(file);

written by objects \\ tags: desktop, edit, editor, file, native

Many developers use the toURL() method of the File class to convert a File to a URL. This method however does not handle correctly escaping characters that are illegal in URL’s (such as spaces) and has been deprecated.

To convert a File to a URL you should instead first use the toURI() method to convert the file path to a URI. The URI class has a toURL() method that can then be used to convert the URI to a URL.

File file = new File(path);
URI uri = file.toURI();
URL url = uri.toURL();

// or alternatively in one line

URL url = file.toURI().toURL();

written by objects \\ tags: file, spaces, URI, url, windows

Java doesn’t provide standard support for using tar archives so a 3rd party implementation is required. One such implementation is provided by ICE Engineering and can be found here.

Here is a simple example of its usage to tar the files in a directory.

		File tarFile = new File("my.tar");
		FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(tarFile);
		TarArchive tar = new TarArchive(out);
		File[] files = directory.listFiles();
		for (File file : files) {
			System.out.println("Adding "+file);
			TarEntry tarEntry = new TarEntry(file);
			tar.writeEntry(tarEntry, false);
		}
                tar.closeArchive();
		out.close();

written by objects \\ tags: archive, file, tar, TarArchive, trustice