NetBeans Platform: Watch out for the Platform security !

I always had the impression that the Platform is quite lax security-wise. Since you have in the Lookup the system ClassLoader it's not like they can restrict your module that much.

Well, I was a little mistaken. Apparently they do add some security checks.

And a particularly strange one is a security check on System.exit().

Actually, it makes sense to restrict calls to System.exit() but the way I've discovered it is surprising: I just moved a JFrame (made with Matisse) from the Java app to the platform. And by default, JFrames, have EXIT_ON_CLOSE set.

Well, on the Platform, the JFrame won't even show up ! Why ? Because of the EXIT_ON_CLOSE property. It eventually boils down to something like:

    SecurityManager security = System.getSecurityManager();
         if (security != null) {
             security.checkExit(0);
         }

which fails inside the platform with an org.netbeans.ExitSecurityException .

So the problem is that initComponents() throws this unchecked exception so the entire new Frame().setVisible(true) call fails. Even more: this doesn't show up in the logs!

Btw, System.exit() works just fine during ModuleInstall. It's LifecycleManager that breaks down at that (early) point.