5 ms·

I haven't looked into the space recently; how would the UI be attached? The only thing I can think of would be <canvas> (2D or WebGL), which both seem like a to

by mook 10y ago

I haven't looked into the space recently; how would the UI be attached? The only thing I can think of would be <canvas> (2D or WebGL), which both seem like a ton of work that the vendors don't have yet. Or do a full rewrite to output HTML of some sort. I thought Java applets were popular partly because the widgets are built-in (not always, of course, and the old widgets look pretty horrible now).

blauditore 10y ago
I'm more thinking of something like Vaadin/GWT where you compose the GUI in Java code, in a similar style as e.g. JavaFX, and the framework takes care of displaying it in a web front end. Or, if the application is not strongly coupled to other server-side systems, make it standalone with a Swing, JavaFX or whatever front end.
tannhaeuser 10y ago
As recently as 3 years ago a customer of mine wanted a Java applet for drag-and-drop/file upload from Outlook. Part of the problem was that Outlook doesn't expose serialized object data to DnD; it was necessary to call into a special API to get at the attachment data (but MS invented DnD so it can't be called non-standard I guess). However, another difficulty with using browser file upload controls was that, for security reasons, programatically (JavaScript) putting a file to upload is forbidden (readonly form attribute) by the respective browser API spec, so in the end the GUI part had to be coded in the Java/applet, too, when the HTML GUI would have been preferable. So my point is that Java applets in recent years weren't used for GUIs so much as they were used for piercing the browser sandbox, and I don't see a solution for this problem now that applets have gone.
josefx 10y ago
I needed the applet for the unrestricted filesystem access it offered when the companies key was trusted by the user. Now I could write a swing application that interacts with the server, making it less integrated and convenient to use (and depending on your opinion less pleasent to look at).

by mook 10y ago

blauditore 10y ago

I'm more thinking of something like Vaadin/GWT where you compose the GUI in Java code, in a similar style as e.g. JavaFX, and the framework takes care of displaying it in a web front end. Or, if the application is not strongly coupled to other server-side systems, make it standalone with a Swing, JavaFX or whatever front end.

tannhaeuser 10y ago

As recently as 3 years ago a customer of mine wanted a Java applet for drag-and-drop/file upload from Outlook. Part of the problem was that Outlook doesn't expose serialized object data to DnD; it was necessary to call into a special API to get at the attachment data (but MS invented DnD so it can't be called non-standard I guess). However, another difficulty with using browser file upload controls was that, for security reasons, programatically (JavaScript) putting a file to upload is forbidden (readonly form attribute) by the respective browser API spec, so in the end the GUI part had to be coded in the Java/applet, too, when the HTML GUI would have been preferable. So my point is that Java applets in recent years weren't used for GUIs so much as they were used for piercing the browser sandbox, and I don't see a solution for this problem now that applets have gone.

josefx 10y ago

I needed the applet for the unrestricted filesystem access it offered when the companies key was trusted by the user. Now I could write a swing application that interacts with the server, making it less integrated and convenient to use (and depending on your opinion less pleasent to look at).