Creating an app bundle with Java and wrapper scripts

MidnightJava

Registered
I'm a Java developer with very little experience on OSX, and I want to start making my apps better integrated with Mac, giving the expected OSX user experience. I'm still doing research on the various aspects of that, but I have a basic question to start our with.

I used Jar Bundler in the Developer/Applications/Java Tools folder, and that was a nice way to cerate an app bundle around a jar file. But now I have a Java app that has a client and server component, which can be launched separately. And the client and server each have a wrapper script that enables them to run as a Unix daemon. The wrapper script calls my jar file, as well as its own jar file, possibly other libraries, a configuration file, log files, etc.

So what I want to do is create the hierarchy of folders and files described above, inside the app bundle. Jar Bundler can do that, but then when you launch the app it invokes the Main class in the jar file. I need it to invoke the wrapper script. I should also mention that I have separate wrapper script files for starting, stopping, and re-starting the daemons.

So my first question is, does it make sense to build this as an app bundle? Would it be a bad thing to just create a folder in the Applications folder, and inside that to have the file structure I mentioned and some alias icons to launch the various wrapper scripts? If I should do this as an app bundle, do I put the app bundle inside a folder with the alias icons mentioned above also in that folder? And most importantly, what tool can I use to create the app bundle that launches wrapper scripts? I want to eventually learn Mac development with Project Builder, but I launched it just to take a look at it, and it seems to be overkill for what I'm trying to do.
 
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