I have been using IntelliJ for a while now and I'm enjoying its suite of features but I'm having a hard time getting the run configurations to work for a java applet. I have a pre-existing Java tool that uses Swing and I'm using the JApplet class to load those GUI objects as an applet. The problem is I have a couple configuration files that I need loaded. I load these from the working directory and from my knowledge, this working directory would normally be the directory in which the applet resides. I think the major problem is IDEA sets the startup variable:
-Didea.launcher.bin.path=IDEA_BIN_DIR
I would like to be able to change this but I am seemingly unable to. I have tried overriding this flag by editing the applets run configuration VM parameters, but IDEA will continue putting the above one in even if I specify something different.
So in short, I'm having a hard time loading a local configuration file because I can't set the working directory for the run configuration in IDEA. Does anyone know how to get around this or know of a better way of running Java applets that use configuration files, in IDEA?
An applet normally runs in a sandbox in a browser, and such an applet can't access the local computer's file system, for security reasons.
Thus it is generally a bad idea to load configuration files from the file system, and "working directory" is not a useful term for an applet.
If these files change seldom (i.e. in principle only by the developer), you can put them to the applet's class files (i.e. in the jar file, or during development in the directory where the classes will be generated), and use class.getResource() or .getResourceAsStream() to load them.
If the configuration files should be definable by the webmaster, put them on the webserver - either at some fixed location relative to getCodeBase() or .getDocumentBase(), or specify them as parameters to your applet tag in the HTML tag.
If these are user specific configuration files (which the applet should be able to write), you either need to store them on the server and retrieve/store after a login (i.e. you need some logic at the server side), or you would store them at the client side.
The current way to do this would be using the JNLP API (in javax.jnlp.*) - there are some interfaces allowing Persistence, or loading/storing data (with the user having a FileChooser). Alternatively, you could sign your applet and request an AllPermission from the user - then you can access the file system.
Sorry, nothing of these answers your original question (I don't use IDEA), but maybe these help you to find another way.