3 replies to this topic

[Jeune]

My classmate told me that Limewire is written in Java. I don't get it.
I tried looking up the limewire program in my harddrive and found out that the shortcut we click to run limewire is actually limewire.exe. I'm curious, how can it be that something written in Java be a .exe file? Aren't java programs supposed to run on the Java Virtual Machine and be .class files?

[beeseven]

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limewire, it is written in Java. The article also says that there are installation packages, which are usually exes. You could try searching your Limewire directory for any jar files, which are basically executables.

[BhajunSingh]

There are several ways. Executable jar files can be wrapped into exe files with utilities such as JShrink and JSmooth, and some other utilities can actually package the classes and jre into a binary executable to run from the temporary files. Finally, java files can actually be compiled into native code by using applications such as JET.

Limewire, though, probably uses the jar wrapper method or limewire.exe is just a loader, included so you don't need jre installed to run it. I've never installed it, though, so I don't know for sure.

[masugidsk8r]

I've installed limewire and I couldtell it was written in Java because of the JRE icon that appears on my taskbar whenever I run it. You will still need to download the JRE which took up about 100megs in my pc. You can count on it that it's written in JAVA.