WebStart

WebStart is a deployment technology for applications written in the Java programming language (such as NeXtMidas). WebStart is included with any version of Oracle Java up to 8, deprecated in 9, and removed in 11. To use WebStart in a browser, the web browser must know where it is installed (see Browsers for details). Once this is done, you can click on a WebStart link in a web page and the browser launches WebStart to run the target application.

Each time a target application runs while a network connection is established, WebStart downloads the latest version of all the necessary jar files and resources to a local cache, and executes the target application from there. Once downloaded, the application runs without a network connection.

Go to Building WebStart Applications for details on configuring an existing NeXtMidas application for WebStart.

Go to Launching WebStart Applications via a CGI Script for details on running WebStart application from a CGI Script.

New IcedTea-Web 1.8.x is now officially supported as of NeXtMidas 4.1.4
NOTE: The 1.8.x series seems to require that javaws be run outside of NMROOT and that the jdk's java.policy file be modified.
This file is located under JAVAHOME/lib/jre/security for jdk8 or JAVAHOME/conf/security for jdk11: 
grant {
  ...
  permission java.security.AllPermission;
  ...
}

Also, RHEL8+ may require libnsl to be installed.