browser launching : Java Glossary

Rendering a Page in an Applet

• Often you want to display some other web page in an Applet. You can trick the browser into doing that for

  this.getAppletContext().showDocument( url, window );

  Your Applet does not get to see the web page. The page goes straight to the browser for rendering. Because this feature can be so easily abused to wallpaper the user’s screen with popups, it is now often blocked.

Launching A Browser in Windows

• So long as an association for html is set up, Windows will let you feed a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) string to the command processor and it will find a browser, launch the browser, and render the page, e.g.

  Runtime.getRuntime().exec( "cmd.exe http://mindprod.com/index.html" );

• Another lower level approach that does not require extension associations to be quite as well set up is:
• Note that a URL is not the same thing as a file name. You can point your browser at a local file with something like this:
  file://localhost/E:/mindprod/index.html
  or the older style:
  file://localhost/E|/mindprod/index.html.
• Note

  rundll32.exe url.dll,FileProtocolHandler file:///E|/mindprod/jgloss.html

  won’t work on the command line because | is reserved as the piping operator, though it will work as an exec parameter passed directly to the rundll32.exe executable.

Launching a Browser on the Mac

• // spawning Firefox on the Mac
  Runtime.getRuntime().exec( new String[] {
                                "open",
                                "-a",
                                "Firefox.app",
                                url.toString()
                             });

Launching a Browser on Multi-Platforms

• Without Java 1.6, displaying spawning a browser to display a variable URL is quite a production. There is no platform-independent API (Application Programming Interface) call to do it. Here is a kludge to pull it off with code that checks the platform.
• BrowserLauncher2 works on W2K/XP/W2003/Vista/W7-32/W7-64/Linux/Ubuntu/Solaris/OSX etc. (but does not support all OS (Operating System) es and browsers) to launch the default browser from an application. This is useful to implement the help files as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).

Launching a Browser in Java version 1.6 or later

• In Java version 1.6 or later there is java.awt.Desktop.