JDIC: browser integration and more (sorry Mac users)
by Kevin Dangoor
Sun has announced the Java Desktop Integration Components (JDIC) project, which is designed to help you integrate your applications with the native desktop better than you can currently. (No writing JNI stuff yourself!)
Part of this includes support for embedding the native browser. That’s a great feature, but it currently only works on Windows, Linux and Solaris. I do hope they add Mac support for that.
That niggle aside, this may come in handy with my current project at work. Our users there are all using Windows.
I suspect that there’s an agreement between Sun and Apple, as part of Apple’s licensing of the JDK, so that Apple is in complete control of what ‘official’ APIs are released.
OSX had native look&feel long before Windows did, so I suspect that Apple is more client-side oriented while Sun does things with client-server or server-side in mind.
I’m sure Apple will wrap Safari in a Java JComponent soon.
Shame none of the demo’s I tried actually worked for me.