I understand that browser's companies are not interested about the applications which use Smart Cards, applets, etc, anymore. So, I'd like to ask you guys about the approach that you will be taking from now and then without NPAPI.
In my company we are developing a new app which is basically digitally sign confidential documents and we are afraid of it and the nexts steps on this NPAPI novel. For now, just Chrome is removing this netscape plugin, but I know the other browsers are planning the same soon. Will we be back to desktop apps in order to sign documents digitally?
Thanks.
FireBreath 2 will allow you to write a plugin that works in NPAPI, ActiveX, or through Native Messaging; it's getting close to ready to go into beta. It doesn't have any kind of real drawing support, but would work for what you describe. The install process is a bit of a pain, but it works.
The FireWyrm protocol that the native messaging component uses could be used with any connection that allows passing text data; it should be possible to make it work with js-ctypes on firefox or plausibly WEB-RTC or even CORS AJAX in some way. For now the only thing we needed to solve was Chrome, but we did it in a way that should be pretty portable to other technologies.
Check the #firebreath IRC channel on freenode if you want to help with the effort.
I think in the future, you will be able to anything you can do in a desktop app in the browser. Chrome is able to remove NPAPI because most plugins can be replaced with HTML5/CSS3 and native browser APIs.
In terms of digital signatures, there are several implementations of capturing them using HTML5 canvas. One example is Signature pad.
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I'm new to Stack Overflow, but I asked a question last night regarding some code and it was answered just over night. I'm very glad I finally signed up here. Anyway, on to my question...
I need to make a mobile version of my website [www.famebyname.us]
I am using Dreamweaver CS6, and my intention with the domain is to turn it into an online nightclub/chat/music type thing. It has a long way to go, but it's basic for now and can do for basic communication. I'd like to make a mobile version of it. But instead of just going forth with that, I thought I'd ask here if anyone could share some experience designing mobile sites [IE button sizes, content alignment, and above all how to keep the smartchatbox working for the mobile device while being size friendly.]
On a site note I'm going to be using the java code below to redirect users with a screen size under 699px to the mobile version aif anyone has any better recommendation for this type of redirection, I'm open to new ideas.
<!--if (screen.width <= 699) { document.location = "mobile.html"; } //-->
Thanks in advance.
Instead of doing all the coding for mobile site. Why not use the framework? There are many frameworks out there that support mobile friendly site. All you need to do is setup files and start calling them in div tags as classes and it will do all by itself. You would need to understand tho how it works.
Checkout this frameworks :
Bootstrap
Foundation
Ui kit
Semantic UI
Dont reinvent the wheel when you such powerful frameworks to help you.
I am working in a web application using ASP.net and C#.
My target is to check on a desktop application on the client machine .. If it was exist then I should launch it. Else if it wasn't exist, we should download, install and then launch it.
I could develop this module using Java Applet but unfortunately, Google decided to disable NPAPI in September 2015, So the applet will not working on Chrome.
My question is about the Applet alternatives to help me implementing the above scenario ?
The only (semi) viable option as far as I can see, is to offer the Chrome user a link to a JNLP file for a desktop application. Then when/if the JWS desktop application starts, have it report back to the server 'loaded OK' and then 'target app. installed/not installed'.
On your server, have a time out for waiting on the client to report back. If it passes that time, presume the client machine does not support Java at all and the user is checking some web service to try and figure out what app. opens a JNLP!
After searching about the most suitable way to achieve my goal, I think using custom protocols will be a nice solution to access my client applications from the web page.
This solution is used by many companies such as Microsoft (using mailto: to open Outlook application) and Apple (using itms: to open iTunes application).
The following link is a very good link which talk about a custom protocols:
https://support.shotgunsoftware.com/entries/86754-How-to-launch-external-applications-using-custom-protocols-rock-instead-of-http-
Once Google Chrome was the first to announce that they won’t be supporting NPAPI anymore, they were also the first to provide a new architecture in order to rewrite your code to work on their browser. You can take a look on Native Messaging, which “can exchange messages with native applications using an API that is similar to the other message passing APIs”. The problem is that this approach only works on Chrome, is not something that you can adapt to other browsers.
A more useful approach is FireBreath, a browser plugin in a post NPAPI world. Check the words below from one buddy of the project:
“FireBreath 2 will allow you to write a plugin that works in NPAPI, ActiveX, or through Native Messaging; it’s getting close to ready to go into beta. It doesn’t have any kind of real drawing support, but would work for what you describe. The install process is a bit of a pain, but it works. The FireWyrm protocol that the native messaging component uses could be used with any connection that allows passing text data; it should be possible to make it work with js-ctypes on firefox or plausibly WEB-RTC or even CORS AJAX in some way. For now the only thing we needed to solve was Chrome, but we did it in a way that should be pretty portable to other technologies.”
Edit - I know there are similar questions to this on SO, but I feel my specific questions are not duplicates at all. If you disagree with me please bring them to my attention before downnvoting or closevoting! If you can prove to me that my question is a true duplicate I will delete this question myself!
My understanding of the GWT is that it provides an SDK and API that allows you to code in Java, and it generates all the client-side HTML, CSS and JavaScript required to run a full-fledged web (or mobile web) app.
My understanding of PhoneGap is that it allows you to code against its JavaScript API and, through configuration, allows you to tell it which native mobile platforms (Android, iOS, Windows Phone, etc.) it should create nativee wrappers for. Hence you "write once, run many" with it, turning your JavaScript code into a native Android app, native iOS app, etc.
If these two assumption are incorrect, please begin by correcting me! And, if there are any caveats to these assumptions, please let me know!
Assuming my understanding on GWT and PhoneGap are more or less correct, I want to try and use them together for an app that would be available as (1) a web app, (2) a mobile web app, (3) an Android app and (4) as an iOS app.
I want to "daisy-chain" these two in my Ant build, whereby my pure Java code is converted (via GWT) into JavaScript (that complies to the PhoneGap API), and then a second build process uses PhoneGap to create and deploy:
A Java WAR (web and mobile web app)
An Android APK
An iOS binary (I believe this is an IPA file, but I may be wrong)
So with those as the "givens", here are my questions:
Is this possible? If not, why? Any way to hack- or juryrig-together a solution that forces this to work?
I've noticed something called gwt-phonegap - will I need this in order for my proposed solution to work, or would this library just be a "nice to have"? Why or why not?
Any other considerations I am not thinking of here? Other libraries or tools that would behoove me?
Note: I have heard (but am not asserting!) that Titanium is superior to PhoneGap. Titanium, however, is not free. And I am quite broke. Thanks in advance for any help here!
There is an open source project out there combining GWT & Phonegap to build mobile apps:
mgwt - http://www.m-gwt.com
There are many people out there using it to build mobile apps and there is quite a lot on documentation including videos there, especially this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V0CdhMFiao&feature=plcp
I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to access a Midi device (like a piano/keyboard or electronic drum set) that is plugged into to a clients USB port over the web.
Obviously the browser security model makes this impossible using just javascript and while it looks like the emerging html5 device standard might help in the future it's apparently not there yet.
So what about flash, silverlight or java? The closest I've found is that silverlight seems to be able to do it if the app is trusted, but that's not a very easy thing to convince a user to do.
Any options?
Yes, this is possible, at least in Windows and MacOS.
I'm not sure how to post a link here, but you can google for "Jazz-Plugin"
The only practical way (that I know of) to achieve this using Silverlight, is platform invocation. This requires Silverlight 5 and the app to run in full trust mode, which makes sense because the app can do pretty much anything with P/Invoke. If a web app allows the developers to access information on a client's computer, then there will have to be some warning or user sign-off (like Silverlight's full trust).
I am evaluating different approaches to building a web based application which handles offline disconnection gracefully. The intention is to create a desktop/tablet UI and a separate mobile UI for the app, backend functionality would be implemented in Java. In principle, the components are mostly there; HTML5 offline seems to have wide support and works well while Web SQL has enough support (Chrome, Opera, iPhone & Android) that we could work with it for offline storage.
As regards creating the UI, it would be nice to use some of the nice JSF libraries out there (Primefaces looks quite nice for example although I've never used it in production). So far, I can't think of any way (and I can't see anything mentioned) of using either HTML5 offline or web SQL in a JSF app. Has this been tried? Is there any methodology/framework that might help here?
I'm also not averse to using client side frameworks. I was very impressed by Dojo for example but then found that it didn't render well on Android with webkit so that ruled it out of use for the tablet scenario. I can probably make jQuery work but I find it to be very fragmented (for example, getting an accordion to handle resizing inside a layout frame just put me off). Finally, I looked at GWT; I wasn't keen on the complexity of getting offline to work and the support for web sql seemed to be a work in progress (no slight intended to the developers, it just seemed to be at an early stage).
So, given the requirement for a web app that runs on desktop/tablet (android) and also on mobile (Android & iPhone) and which handles offline, how would you approach things?
Thanks,
Phil