P4 Description
From Kumar Srinivasan: I think my comments are in general there are lot of places you say that the launcher finds this and does that, most of it is untrue.
Think of launcher as the starter of a car, its job is to take the input from the user and crank the engage with the flywheel, crank and disengage, and get the engine running, and disengage.
Similarly the launcher, takes its input from the user and the user's environment, interfaces with the VM and gets it started via some bootstrapping, the JVM does most of the work ie. setting up the classpath, bootclasspath and such, the launcher simply marshals this information to the JVM.
For instance: http://st-doc.us.oracle.com/review/rsb/html/E38209_02/findingclasses.htm#A1012444 "How the Java Launcher Finds Classes", the launcher does not find any classes, the launcher simply passes the information to the VM to find its classes. I would rather you phrase it as "How the Java Virtual Machine Finds Classes" or simply "How the Java Runtime Finds Classes".
Think of launcher as the starter of a car, its job is to take the input from the user and crank the engage with the flywheel, crank and disengage, and get the engine running, and disengage.
Similarly the launcher, takes its input from the user and the user's environment, interfaces with the VM and gets it started via some bootstrapping, the JVM does most of the work ie. setting up the classpath, bootclasspath and such, the launcher simply marshals this information to the JVM.
For instance: http://st-doc.us.oracle.com/review/rsb/html/E38209_02/findingclasses.htm#A1012444 "How the Java Launcher Finds Classes", the launcher does not find any classes, the launcher simply passes the information to the VM to find its classes. I would rather you phrase it as "How the Java Virtual Machine Finds Classes" or simply "How the Java Runtime Finds Classes".