[LUCENE-369] Cannot use Lucene in an unsigned applet due to Java security restrictions

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Component/s: core/other

Environment

Operating System: All
Platform: All

• Bugzilla Id: 34359
• Assignee: Lucene Developers
• Reporter: Jon Schuster
• Created: 08/Apr/05 05:29
• Updated: 28/Nov/24 16:16
• Resolved: 27/May/06 01:39

Description

A few of the Lucene source files call System.getProperty and perform a couple of
other operations within static initializers that assume full Java 2 permissions.
This prevents Lucene from being used from an unsigned applet embedded in a
browser page, since the default security permissions for an applet will prohibit
reading of most properties.

I would suggest wrapping the initialization of the properties in try/catch
blocks. This does mean that a couple properties would need to be made non-final,
and in some cases, getter and setter methods might be desirable to allow the
applet programmer to change the property values at runtime (some variables are
public static and could be changed directly without accessors).

This problem occurs with the shipping 1.4.3 version as well as the latest (as of
07-apr-2005) source code fetched from CVS.

Currently, the files that are affected are org.apache.lucene.index.IndexWriter,
org.apache.lucene.index.SegmentReader, org.apache.lucene.search.BooleanQuery,
and org.apache.lucene.store.FSDirectory.

I have modified versions of these files with some suggested changes, plus a
simple test applet and associated files that demonstrate the situation. The
sample applet can be launched in a browser either by double-clicking the file
locally or by putting it on a web server and launching it from an http URL. As
soon as I can figure out how to attach to a bug report, I'll do that.

P.S. This topic came up in August, 2004 in lucene dev mailing list but as far as
I can tell, has not yet been resolved.