Patent attributes
A system for selecting a compatible environment for executing an application on a data processing system that has two or more execution environments installed includes retrieving information that indicates a set of execution environments that are compatible with a particular application. The system's files are searched to find one or more of the compatible environments on the system. If multiple compatible execution environments are found, one of the execution environments is selected for executing the application. If no compatible environment is found, an alert is issued. The compatible execution environment information may be a prioritized list of execution environments. In such a case, the highest priority execution environment found on the system is selected. In one embodiment, the application is a Java® application and the execution environments comprise Java® runtime environments. The compatible execution environments may be provided via a JAR file manifest or via a JNLP file.
