So I'm used to controlling every pixel on the screen and having dynamic displays of information and although I've been doing webapps the last 3 years or so, it's been a constant, background irritation that I was so much at the mercy of the limitations (and capricious interpretations thereof) of HTML.
And now I've got a situation where a user can start a rather lengthy process and I'd really, really like to display some real-time information about the progress of said process, without requiring the user to hit "refresh" or doing something lame like having the browser page auto-reload every 5 seconds.
The solution seemed obvious: use an applet. And wow, look, applets are pretty easy to write, and I'm not sure how I'll hit the database yet but hey, let's just get something going quickly here and see how it works and start designing all that chewy user interface goodness with a chocolate center.
The more experienced Turbine users out there are already starting to snicker, I know.
Over the past couple of days I've been going slowly insane trying to figure out how to use a Java applet in my Turbine/Velocity web application. In most browsers, the area for the Java applet is blank, generally with a red "X" or other indication of failure. A couple of browsers display an error message about a "bad magic number."
Searching the archives, I see this question has been asked several times before. Responses fall into three categories:
* No response at all-- this is the most common. This is disheartening.
* A suggestion that the error message indicates that the applet class or jar file is corrupted.
* A sarcastic comment that this mailing list is for Turbine and not client-side stuff like applets.
Well, the applet file isn't corrupted; it works fine in a simple hand-coded HTML page. Furthermore, the "bad magic number" error message seems to be pretty generic: I can change any attribute of <applet> to a random string, and get the _same message_. And I used to complain about Mac OS error numbers, can you believe it?
Because I have faith, I refuse to believe (admittedly in the face of mounting evidence) that it's _impossible_ to use applets in a Turbine/Velocity application. If I hadn't methodically tried almost every directory in the webapp hierarchy, I'd think it was simply a matter of putting the applet files in the right place.
But damned if I can figure out what it is.
Somebody out there must have done this. Or know how to do this.
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