Fabi?n Mandelbaum wrote: > I was wondering if it's possible to use XXE (or a part of it, as a > minimum, the styled editor) as an applet. > > Can XXE be used as an applet? > Which kind of licensing one needs to do so? > Which are the limitations? > How 'big' would that applet be? (a few KB? a few MB?) >
Last year, we had an Applet Edition of our XML Editor (a kind of sophisticated, styled, scriptable using JavaScript, ``XML Area'') which ran inside any Web browser having the Java Plug-in. The only limitations compared to XXE were: * Being an ``XML Area'', it was limited to a single document and a single view, at a time. * By default, its GUI was much less adorned than XXE's . For example, by default, it used dialog boxes rather than the XXE's Tool panes (but that was fully configurable using .xxe_gui files). After spending a lot of time developing and testing it, we found that this Applet Edition had erratic keyboard focus problems which, in practice, made it unusable. Therefore, we decided to give up the idea of marketing this product. Our conclusion: simple, small (several KB), pure visualization, applets seem to work (we have delevopped a few of these for Renault F1 Team). Large (several MB[*]), complex, manipulating the the keyboard focus and having many keyboard shortcuts, applets will not work and you'll loose your time trying to make them work. All in all, for us, Java applets seem to be a dead technology. For an easy deployment of Java apps that always works great, we rely on Java Web Start. --- [*] Not a problem because applets may be cached on the client side.
