This program customizes the UI of HotJava (using the properties file), and implements a new protocol handler. This protocol handler used RMI to fetch business objects from an object server (as part of a multi-tier client/server architecture). The handler then programatically generates HTML (within the browser's process space), which is then rendered by HotJava.
Disclamer: This is code that I hacked together before the show. It's not well documented, and it's not very complete. It might be interesting, though, if you want to get some idea of how to add a protocol handler.
You can download the code in either .tar.gz or .zip format:
The client-side application is implemented as a combination of html and Java code. The Java implements the custom protocol handler. The server side is implemented as an RMI server, written in Java. Both are launched from the bin directory: RunServer starts the RMI registry, and runs the server application. AutoClub starts the browser, after setting various parameters to customize the browser. (Sorry, I only have Unix versions of the launching scripts. It should be trivial to convert them to .bat files, however.)
The .hotjava directory contains HotJava's home directory. Notably, this contains the properties file, which is used to override HotJava's default properties. This is how the UI is customized -- no code!
The html directory simply contains html that's loaded for literal strings by the protocol handler.
lib is simply where the properties file is stored (.hotjava actually contains a symlink here).
src is where all the Java source code lives. I didn't seperate the code for the client and server sides -- they're just mushed into one directory hierarchy. In a real application, of course, you'd want to seperate the two, and have a library of classes that are needed on both sides. There's a (primitive) top-level Makefile in src.
src/autoclub/protocol contains the acutal protocol hander. This is written along the lines described in The HotJava user's guide. This handler is the where the distinction between "autoclub://static" (for "static" content off the application server) and "autoclub://rmi" (for content calculated from objects fetched by RMI) is made. RMI requests are passed off to RmiURLConnection, part of the autoclub.connection package.
src/autoclub/connection contains RmiURLConnection, and the classes used to implement it. RmiURLConnection uses command objects to implement individual commands. A real application would use a hash table to get the right command class; I just use an if chain. The command classes are in src/autoclub/connection.
src/autoclub/model contains the business objects that get passed between server and client. In this program, they're very simple data holders. These two classes are used both client- and server-side
src/autoclub/rmi contains the RMI server. The server is completely implemented in one interface and one class, for a total of 121 lines of source (including the wordy copyright notice!). I must say that I was quite impressed how easy RMI is to use.
I hope you find this short demo useful. Please do remember -- this is a quick hack I threw together. When I write real code, it's much better than this :-)
Cheers,