如何从可运行的jar文件中执行.exe

Question

I am working on a Java desktop application and want to execute an .exe file upon some user action.

I want to package the .exe inside the executable jar so that I have to ship just one item to my customer/user. But so far I have not been able to execute an .exe file which is packaged inside the jar.

One more input, the .exe in turn uses a bunch of .dll, .xml and .exe files (total 12 files), so I need to package all of them to make this work. Is this possible in java or should I use another language to achieve this?

I chose java because I want to support Mac platform also. So with these .exe and .dll files (for Win), I need to package and execute a bunch of Unix executable files and dylib files also (for Mac).

What would be the best way to achieve this?

I can think of 2 ways:

1. Make one Java executable app and dynamically execute exe or Unix executable file depending on platform it is running. The problem here is executing the files which are packaged within the jar.
2. Make separate applications for Win and Mac. In this case, which languages should I use?

Thanks much for the help!

Answer 1

Applications are packaged very differently on windows and mac. For the Windows version I would recommend you to distribute an installation program (see IzPack for instance) that will unpack the jar and the exe in the application directory (I don't believe you can directly execute an exe that's in a jar file). A MacOS application is actually a directory with a certain structure, so in your case, the said directory could contain both the jar and the exe.