| BrowserLauncher is a class that provides one static method, openURL, which
opens the default web browser for the current user of the system to the given
URL. It may support other protocols depending on the system -- mailto, ftp,
etc. -- but that has not been rigorously tested and is not guaranteed to
work.
Yes, this is platform-specific code, and yes, it may rely on classes on
certain platforms that are not part of the standard JDK. What we're trying to
do, though, is to take something that's frequently desirable but inherently
platform-specific -- opening a default browser -- and allow programmers (you,
for example) to do so without worrying about dropping into native code or
doing anything else similarly evil.
Anyway, this code is completely in Java and will run on all JDK 1.1-compliant
systems without modification or a need for additional libraries. All classes
that are required on certain platforms to allow this to run are dynamically
loaded at runtime via reflection and, if not found, will not cause this to do
anything other than returning an error when opening the browser.
There are certain system requirements for this class, as it's running through
Runtime.exec(), which is Java's way of making a native system call.
Currently, this requires that a Macintosh have a Finder which supports the
GURL event, which is true for Mac OS 8.0 and 8.1 systems that have the
Internet Scripting AppleScript dictionary installed in the Scripting
Additions folder in the Extensions folder (which is installed by default as
far as I know under Mac OS 8.0 and 8.1), and for all Mac OS 8.5 and later
systems. On Windows, it only runs under Win32 systems (Windows 95, 98, and NT
4.0, as well as later versions of all). On other systems, this drops back
from the inherently platform-sensitive concept of a default browser and
simply attempts to launch Netscape via a shell command.
This code is Copyright 1999-2001 by Eric Albert (ejalbert@cs.stanford.edu)
and may be redistributed or modified in any form without restrictions as long
as the portion of this comment from this paragraph through the end of the
comment is not removed. The author requests that he be notified of any
application, applet, or other binary that makes use of this code, but that's
more out of curiosity than anything and is not required. This software
includes no warranty. The author is not repsonsible for any loss of data or
functionality or any adverse or unexpected effects of using this software.
Credits:
Steven Spencer, JavaWorld magazine (Java Tip
66)
Thanks also to Ron B. Yeh, Eric Shapiro, Ben Engber, Paul Teitlebaum, Andrea
Cantatore, Larry Barowski, Trevor Bedzek, Frank Miedrich, and Ron Rabakukk
Latest version can be found at: SourceForge.
author:
Eric Albert (author:
href="mailto:ejalbert@cs.stanford.edu">ejalbert@cs.stanford.edu)
version:
1.4b1 (Released June 20, 2001) |
