Babiloo Portable 0.6.0 Dev Test 4 (Testers, please)

Hi Ivan

Babiloo was relatively easy to make portable.

• To keep the settings out of %APPDATA%, I basically execute the babiloo.jar file with -Duser.home=[data folder] on the USB drive
• I use the "portable" Java that John set up for Open Office
• I think I seed the default properties file so it looks for dictionaries on the USB drive
• I use the standard "replace in file" technique from John's launchers to fix the drive letter in properties files that use an absolute path, when the USB drive is in a different machine where the drive letter changes

Really, to make it Portable, the idea is to keep the default settings off of the user profile on drive C:, and preferably in a Data directory parallel to the Babiloo app directory (rather than below it). This allows the PAM backup to backup all the portable app settings and data in a consistent way. The -Duser.home= command line parameter seems to do this okay, although it is named .jalingo.

The other issue is what to do when the USB drive letter changes. If the dictionary location or other data pointed to by the properties file uses an absolute path that starts with a drive letter, Babiloo might have trouble finding the dictionary. (Another OS might manifest this problem a different way, e.g. if the USB drive is mounted at one mount point, and the properties file has an absolute path that references a different mount point it used on a previous machine.) If your program could save locations like that using relative paths (relative to the babiloo.jar, for example) rather than absolute, it might make it easier to get things going on a different machine. On a default Windows install, where the properties files are stored in the User Profile on drive C, there may not be a relative path, and that's okay; but if the jar file and properties file and dictionaries and so forth are all stored in the same directory tree on a USB Drive, relative paths would be a fairly elegant solution.

I have seen several Java launchers for Windows -- they create a custom windows .EXE file that finds and validates the JVM and makes sure the java program it launches can find all the classes it needs. The NSIS launcher does that, although in a less sophisticated way than some. It also does some stuff that sets things up for John's Portable Apps Platform, but that shouldn't get in the way too much if someone is running it by itself.

If you can't unpack the Babiloo_Portable...paf.exe file (which includes the source), I could send you a copy of the NSIS script, which is fairly straightforward.

re: Portablizing java -- that's something John introduced as an option with OOoPortable; what it does is set up a Java on your stick. One of the benefits of that option is that you get to take a version with you that is likely to work, so you are less dependent on whatever is installed on the machine. It is just an option, so you aren't expected to do it; but if you were to try it and it did work, it would prove the benefit of using that option. On the other hand, I suppose we should make it work with whatever odd configurations people have, in addition to providing an option that might make it work even more consistently.

The message you are seeing means that it does not see javaw.exe in that directory. Can you confirm that there is a javaw.exe in that jre_1.5.0_07\bin directory?

There is a debug section in the BabilooPortable\Data\settings\BabilooPortableSettings.ini file, but if it bailed out at that point, you'll just have something from a previous working install there.