Thatotherguy, how far have you come with making a webstart?
I simply went and took an existing jnlp, in this case from Kev's kitipong, and altered the text in it, like this:
Code:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<jnlp
spec="1.0+"
codebase="http://www.karlmacklin.com/java"
href="memory.jnlp">
<information>
<title>Karl's Kard's</title>
<vendor>Karl Macklin</vendor>
<homepage href="http://www.karlmacklin.com"/>
<description>Karl's Kard's</description>
<description kind="short">Karl's Kard'ss</description>
<!--<icon href="icon.gif"/>-->
</information>
<resources>
<j2se href="http://java.sun.com/products/autodl/j2se" version="1.4+" max-heap-size="128m"/>
<jar href="memory.jar"/>
<extension href="http://slick.cokeandcode.com/demos/slick.jnlp"/>
</resources>
<application-desc main-class="com.karlmacklin.memory.Memory"/>
</jnlp>
What you do is simply exchange the relevant info with your own, save as a jnlp, execute it (no need to put the jnlp online) and see if that works. Now, things might get more complicated if you're using any extra libraries, which I guess you do, but I'm sure someone could help out with that little problem.
The jar file itself is like a zip file. For my memory game, the files it contains are the class files and the resources, and that's it.
At first I was set on creating a working executable jar file, and I tried putting in every lib I could find, ended up with a 10 mb jar that still couldn't be run.
Also, you might see it says version="1.4+", well that's not true in my case so that messed things up for some ppl with older Java versions, but it worked for anyone with the most recent version. I myself am totally lost when it comes to webstart's, and I agree on Java having a distribution system quite disheartening for newbies.
Just try it out, see how far you get and post any troubles here and I or someone can hopefully push over the next hump.