Handle errors running Java from batch file

Question

I've got a (fairly typical) setup at the moment of launching my Java application through a batch file calling the jar file with appropriate parameters, which most of the time works absolutely fine. However, I'd like to be able to deal with any errors that might occur nicely.

At the moment I've got something like

java -Xms1024m -Xmx1024m -jar Quelea.jar
IF NOT (%ERRORLEVEL% == 0) cscript MessageBox.vbs "Application failed to start."

The last line is basically the first answer on this question .

I'd like something a bit more fully featured though, even if it's a case of capturing the output from launching the process and then dumping it in the message box (ok, it's not pretty but it shouldn't appear to start with and when it does appear that then gives me some immediate debugging information without having to ask the user to grab out log files!) Or are there any other approaches that people use in similar situations?

I'm not talking about exceptions thrown in my code (which I deal with once the application starts) I'm talking about hard errors that prevent it starting such as using an old JRE version, not having enough memory to reserve for heap, that sort of thing.

Answer 1

I suggest using a Java executable wrapper. I like the following, but there are others.

http://launch4j.sourceforge.net/