How to start Filemaker web console after it has been fucked
2013-04-10 09:16:43
For many good reasons, Apple has locked down Java Web Start in recent updated to Lion and Mountain Lion. For less good reasons, they are shunting responsibility to Oracle for Mac OS X Java. Oracle, it seems, can barely give a fuck about Java on OS X. It's hard to blame them since they probably make zero money on it.
What really blows: FileMaker, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple depends heavily on Java for the entire FileMaker admin console UI. So, this mission critical UI that is made by an Apple subsidiary keeps breaking all the time when Apple issues various death edict patches on Java.
The support suggestion from Apple and FileMaker is "just get Java from Oracle." Unfortunately, this doesn't solve the problem at all. Trying to launch JWS console still complains that you should install Java from Oracle, even though you fucking already did.
So, here's one thing that works:
download FireFox, which lets you save the .jnlp web start file to your downloads folder.
in a terminal, type
javaws admin_console_webstart.jnlp
or whatever the filename was you saved.