general documents:
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How applet presentation is accomplished, though semi-automated, is complex and not discussed in the manual. Nor are libraries necessary to do this released (though the core libraries and kawDoc organization were tweeked in the current release to support this). However, there is more description of how it's done below somewhere.
My jars are compiled under Java 1.7.0_01
, the latest I could download prior to finalizing this posting. This applet won't work unless your Java JRE is at least that version or later.
Some notes about problems/phenomena you might experience are also given. These are illustrative, not exhaustive, and perhaps not even accurate. They are just some of the experiences I remember having while trouble-shooting the various browsers I explored. This might help you get things working, if they don't work right off.
Painting/repainting has some synch problems, and this is a problem for all browsers (to varying degree). If you believe the applet hasn't repainted (e.g., you've switched back from another tab of your browser and the kawDoc-applet doesn't appear as expected), clicking where you think the kawDoc-applet should be works for me. Re-sizing the browser to get everything in it to paint, on a partial applet paint, may also work. A different kind of painting problem, associated with text presentation while scrolling the textPanes, occurs if you request the applet to be displayed with 100% on both width and height. Requesting 100% width and 90% height fixed the problem, which I associate with the presence of an outer (browser-owned?) scroll bar (i.e., when that outer scroll bar is absent, the text painting problem is absent).
Finally, with regard to painting synch problems, it's reasonable to full around with "full-screen" mode in the browser. Here again, clicking in the applet space may help any (persistent) presentation problems you may see, although full-screen mode seems more problematic with regards to painting issues.
For many browsers (i.e., Internet Explorer
, Chrome
, perhaps Safari
) you have to grant specific permissions to run plug-ins and/or allow pop ups at the specific website hosting the manual. Sometimes I can figure out how to make the "exception request" permanent, but a lot times the browser seems to ignore the request (e.g. Chrome) or revert to asking.
The browsers I have explored, using the latest browser versions I could find (at the time of posting), are ordered according to the amount of apparent problems. These browsers were explored under a Windows XP
and Windows 7
-- 64 bit -- environment (no other environment).
Mozilla FireFox
: I don't remember any other specific problems besides painting issues.
Google Chrome
Apple Safari
Windows Internet Explorer (v8 on XP; v9 on 7)
If you think this works ok (i.e., pretty fast), check out the Java Control Panel
available in the Windows Control Panel. The part I'm referring to is on the "general" tab, then press the "view..." button in the "Temporary Internet Files" section. There you will see that the JVM (?) is caching most if not all of the kawDoc resources (not just jar files, but image files) from the domain the kawDocs launch from. I had nothing to do with this; it's just part of the applet strategy, and it works pretty well.
With regard to some of the kawDoc-relevant resources the JVM caches, you will see xml files as resources. These are the "serialized" form of the kawDocs and they have to reside on the applet codeBase path in a predictable way (i.e., analogous to how they appear in the desktop environment) and have their html "shells" on top of the codeBase . That, in a high-level nutshell, is how you do kawDocs as applets.
The downside of caching: if I update the applet-ized kawDocs too frequently, a webUser may not see the most recent versions, unless the cached materials have expired (but this is something like 3 days in the future by default?). Purging the relevant files also forces the most recent versions. This is a user/client action: view temporary internet files in Java Control Panel's
, sort the listed files by URL, shift-select and delete the relevant stretch of them.