[Bluej-discuss] Windows Vista and BlueJ

[Bryan J. Higgs]

I just came across the following post, which may help people sort out 
what's happening with Java on Vista:

    http://weblogs.java.net/blog/chet/archive/2006/10/java_on_vista_y.html

It contains quite a bit of detail, and specifies what to expect from 
Java 1.4.2, 1.5, and 1.6 on Vista

Short answer: you probably should move to Java 1.6, if possible, but 1.5 
sounds like it should work in most cases. Java 1.4.2 sounds like it 
won't be ideal, and you probably shouldn't even consider earlier 
versions of Java.

You definitely want to update your Java installation with the update 
patches, which can be automated in Java 1.5 and 1.6, akin to the Windows 
Update mechanism.

I hope that's helpful...

Bryan

Davin McCall wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> As Windows Vista is becoming more prevalent, we are getting quite a 
> few support requests about some problems which are occurring. I want 
> to try and give some advance warning on this list to anyone who might 
> be upgrading to Vista in the near future.
>
> BlueJ when running on Windows uses the "Windows look-and-feel" 
> provided by java, by default. The implementation of the look-and-feel 
> is somewhat less robust than one might hope and even on Windows XP 
> machines it sometimes causes problems. *As it turns out, the Java 5.0 
> (and earlier) implementation of the Windows look-and-feel fails 
> miserably on Windows Vista*. This usually manifests itself as file 
> dialogs failing to open (for instance, the "new project", "open 
> project", etc commands in the project menu appear to do nothing when 
> they are clicked).
>
> I understand that the 6.0 version of the JDK is Vista-compatible and 
> one solution for people who want to use BlueJ on Vista may therefore 
> be to upgrade to Java 6.0 (not forgetting that you must run the 
> "select VM" utility to make sure that BlueJ uses the new JDK). 
> However, we haven't yet had any confirmation that this does in fact 
> solve the problem (if anyone can verify, please let us know).
>
> There is another workaround for the issue, and that is to disable the 
> use of the Windows look-and-feel in BlueJ. This involves editing the 
> "bluej.defs" configuration file and changing the "bluej.lookAndFeel" 
> setting to "crossplatform". (Just remove the '#' at the beginning of 
> the existing line in the file). BlueJ's appearance is somewhat uglier 
> when this is done, however the file dialogs should no longer fail to 
> appear.
>
> For more help on editing the bluej.defs file, see 
> http://www.bluej.org/help/archive.html#tip4 or consult the reference 
> manual.
>
> Davin
>
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