RIA runtimes are getting more complex with every new technology available in the market. Building “pure Ajax” applications in many cases already means that you’ll embed a SWF movie file into your page for audio playback or video functionality. Technologies with support for multiple runtimes – like OpenLaszlo – create APIs for integrating applications deployed in different runtimes. In OpenLaszlo’s case that would for example be a video player or chat component deployed in an OpenLaszlo application utilizing the DHTML runtime, like in this example application of an Ajax MP3 player using a SWF runtime OpenLaszlo app for playback of the audio.
JavaFX is another technology that would be perfect for building mixed runtime applications. Imagine you want to re-use a widget you built in Ajax or Flash within JavaFX, with the ability to drag the application onto your desktop? Sun announced the JWebPane or HTML component last year, which effectively is a Webkit browser embedded into JavaFX.
JavaFX JWebPane Demo from JavaONE 2008
Artem Ananiev wrote a few blog posts on the technology in May/June 2008, but things have been relatively quiet for some time. In December Alexey Ushakov announced that he’s the new tech lead for the JWebPane project, and he’s going to demo the latest version of his work at JavaONE (BOF 3992 - Meet the Team Behind JWebPane, and Learn Advanced Tips and Tricks).
JWebPane will support the following features:
- Loading control — load, stop, and reload functions.
- Listeners handling. — typical function enabling a developer to get, add, and remove listeners.
- JavaScript support
With JWebPane utilizing Webkit, that browser turns into something like the preferred solution for embedding a browser into 3rd party software – next to Adobe’s AIR technology. I wonder if we’ll see something like a standardized HTML component at some point for various RIA technologies. If a large number of applications and technologies require such a feature, it would make sense to standardize the way to embed HTML content based on iFrames or embedded browsers into RIAs.
