Creating JNLP on fly with php having issue with icedtea web start

Question

I am using PHP/JSP to generate jnlp file on the fly. I use one url www.example.com/start that reads a jnlp file that contains some tags which are replaced with dynamic values. It replace the tag(arg1,arg2) with some calculated values in the file and then output the jnlp file that is downloaded on user browser. the JNLP file contains following url as href in codebase.

test.php?arg1=value&arg2=val2

the test.php file reads the URI and output the same jnlp file again. this file doesn't calculate anything. It just replaces the received value in URL with the tags of file as above.

Issue:

When I run the url www.example.com/start in browser and open the jnlp with javaws, it works fine but if I use icedtea which is default option in firefox to open jnlp file then it doesn't work and show a jnlp read error.

In my investigation, I found that when we open jnlp with icedtea, it doesn't pass the ?arg1=value&arg2=val2 in test.php that cause issue. Can anybody help me on this.

Answer 1

I can confirm this issue, IcedTea strips all query parameters (everything after the ? ) when requesting the .jar, while Sun/Oracle implementations pass them to the server. I did not dig the JNLP specs to confirm if this is a bug in IcedTea.

We worked around this using a URL rewrite rule on the server which maps maps the query parameters to path components.