20130919 (Thursday, 19 September 2013)

Updated docs.

It’s expensive to use Java!

The problem with DavLink raising a SecurityException after the Java update has caused us a lot of work:

• Luc about 30 hours

• Gerd about 10 hours

• Nicolas about 3 hours

• Plus the fact that users could not use Lino to generate CVs from June until September.

The crucial missing piece was to wrap security-related actions into a PrivilegedAction class, as described in Setting Privileges for Extensions.

Our problem is especially illustrative because it is so evident that all this work could have been avoided if I had known this trick before.

According to the docs this trick is not necessary for applets. The trail about Deployment does not contain a single link to this article. It is used for extensions and described in a trail “The Extension Mechanism” in the third subdivision (entitled “Specialized Trails and Lessons”).

I believe that the Java documentation is really good… but either it is not up to date, or the PrivilegedAction incidentally works around some fatal bug…