Dolphin inside Internet Explorer?

I understand that we can present a browser inside a Dolphin application; I'm
wondering about the opposite. Given the continuing popularity of the "web",
and the limitations of HTML, I was wondering about using Dolphin instead.
There are a number of popular applications that "run" in a browser, that
seem to have a minimal tie to the browser. These applications generally
involve some sort of download, so it seems that code is being run locally.
Examples include Flash, RainDance, and numerous others. I'm wondering if I
can address the political wars of simple installation and upgrade, giving
the impression that we have a web-based, thin-client application, but still
use Smalltalk. I realize that I'd still be limited to an environment that
would run Dolphin (i.e., not the Mac or Linux), but for certain applications
that would be fine. We are looking at a commercial application delivered
with a "web-UI" (which I take to mean we don't want to do any client-based
installations).

I've done a bit of investigation. There is a discussion on the Dolphin site
about a browser plug-in, but this seems to be rather old and includes the
explanation that it doesn't work for IE. From the looking around I've done,
I believe that I need something along the lines of an ActiveX component, but
I'm not sure where to begin. Has anyone done this?

James Foster
Fargo, North Dakota, USA

James,

> I've done a bit of investigation. There is a discussion on the
> Dolphin site about a browser plug-in, but this seems to be rather old
> and includes the explanation that it doesn't work for IE. From the
> looking around I've done, I believe that I need something along the
> lines of an ActiveX component, but I'm not sure where to begin. Has
> anyone done this?

The browser plug-in (aka Dolphin's WebDeploymentKit or WDK) may be old
but should still work if you can find a browser that supports Netscape
type plug-ins (I assume that the latest version of Netscape still
does?).  Dolphin 5.1 Pro can still deploy to binary packages and I
assume that a web VM that is compatible with D5 is accessible on the OA
web site?

I'm not suggesting that you use this as a solution to your problem but
if you have a play with it then it might help to give you some idea of
what is or isn't possible.  I seem to recall (I haven't used the WDK
since IE5.5 when it's Netscape plug-in support disappeared)  that
converting a MVP application to work in a web browser was really easy.

NB: I think OA mentioned that the WDK will probably disappear from
Dolphin 6.

--
Ian

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