System Design Question

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Background:
I have an intranet application.
Part of it is a java desktop application deployed via Java Webstart.
This app then communicates with the server using the http protocol,
to do this I have to hard code the server address.

Problem:
I have this deployed in 50 companies.
Every time I do an update to the system, I have to do a build for each company to change the server address, not a huge problem at the moment, but still time consuming.

Question:
Any suggestions as to how I could get the application to get the server address on the fly, so i don't have to hard code it.

Webmonkey

Have a fixed location that supplies the server address? and load it from there - or even store the server address in a file on the local machine and just update the text file rather than the server.

ressem

Well JINI is designed for service discovery on a LAN.
http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~davids/courses/CA464/week2.pdf

--edit: wrong link pasted. This is someone else's code to do simple discovery by multicasting. --
http://www.developer.com/article.php/10915_3728576_1

for sample code for a client and server.

Though the alternative of allowing the server address to be set in a JNLP xml <param> would make sense for autodiscovery pessimists like me.

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Webmonkey wrote:

Have a fixed location that supplies the server address? and load it from there - or even store the server address in a file on the local machine and just update the text file rather than the server.

Than would make the job even more time consuming

ressem wrote:

--edit: wrong link pasted. This is someone else's code to do simple discovery by multicasting. --
http://www.developer.com/article.php/10915_3728576_1

That looks like an option, might be a bit heavy weight if it has to be run every time tha app starts

From link seems to match my requirements wrote:

The client side of involved a little Swing app that ran on their desktop and interacted with the a network service. However, given the rather dynamic nature of our working environment, I didn't want to have to distribute an update for the client Swing app just because I had to move the service to a different host machine.

ressem wrote:

Though the alternative of allowing the server address to be set in a JNLP xml <param> would make sense for autodiscovery pessimists like me.

Thats the solution I'm looking at, so when the server starts up at installation/update it would perform a one off hard code of the address that can be accessed by the app before it is deployed.

cheers