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Java chat room problems
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Posted by: isisisis
I need some advice about a java program, please help!
We have a large distance-learning course running on software from quite a well-known provider of VLEs. They promised us a "whiteboard" feature, which is a kind of glorified chat room that displays pictures on a whiteboard as well as allowing people to chat and we use it for assessed online meetings.
When the whiteboard was finally delivered, it turned out to be a stand-alone java app, and our students had great difficulty in getting it running. Most of them needed to download the entire JRE from Sun in order to run the program - and a significant number never actually got it to work.
We had to backtrack and use their (rather primitive) normal chat room instead, which lacks various features that we need.
We need a solution that 100% of students can use, no buts. Are we stuck with a bog-standard chat room for ever? Is it at all likely that the application could be re-written as an applet - and would this increase the likelihood that all the students could access it or not? any other ideas?
Posted by: zorg
Im not a great expert, but depending on what you would want from it and how new this applet is that has been developed, they will have to download the java runtime evironment from the sun website. Im sure you should be able to get it to work IF all of the users have the runtime environment installed and updated. By the way there are programs out there, there is a very popular "pictionary" type website, which has a chatroom adn a whiteboard where you can then draw images and the rest of the group then needs to guess what you are drawing. Im guessing this is exactly what you need. This alons shows to me that what you want is indeed possible. Below is a link to the game
http://www.isketch.net/isketch.shtml
just logon as whatever, you then choose a room ( uk / us ) whatever and then join that room and start guessing what is being drawn by the other members in the room.
I hopt this helped, if not at least you can now play pictionary online 
Posted by: redwench
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Originally Posted by isisisis
Most of them needed to download the entire JRE from Sun in order to run the program - and a significant number never actually got it to work.
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thats what most people need to do to run java. you download jre from sun. even on dialup, its not that horrendous. i should know, had to get several different versions a few months ago.
the latest version or 2 of jre doesnt work on all systems. the individual user will have to find a version that does work. sun keeps an older version on their site, and other sites to keep archives. of course, thats in addition to the usual troubleshooting, like running a checkdisk and defrag, and doing a sweep for viruses and spyware.
i would suggest you put up several versions of jre for each os on your site, or provide links. and have your IT personnel come up with a checklist of things to do/check before attempting to install jre or your application.
its time consuming and frustrating to get java to work sometimes, but once it is, theres generally no further problems. it should work on all machines [above the min reqs, of course] eventually.
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