Sunday, June 17, 2018

NumericalChameleon is running in the web browser using Webswing

Today I run the NumericalChameleon (a Swing based app) in my web browser on my desktop by using Webswing. It really works like a charm! The NC GUI acts in just the same way as it does when running natively.

It works like a charm - in the web browser on the desktop

I downloaded and installed Webswing 2.5.4. and I did no modifications on the NumericalChameleon 2.1.0. I just copied the NC folder to the Webswing demo folder and entered some values at the configuration dialog such as Name, Icon, Home Folder, Working Directory, Class Path, etc. After I have configured it in Webswing, the app appears in the app list of Webswing:





The NC GUI acts in just the same way as it does when running natively on bare metal.

Even theme selection, language selection, restarting the app, updating exchange rates and audio was working (at least when the process is running on localhost)! The performance is surprisingly good, although a little bit slower if I compare it with native performance.

One (minor) problem I found was that opening help and opening data tables didn't work, because the help files and data tables are stored locally as HTML. In the log I found traces of "WebPaintDispatcher:notifyOpenLinkAction", so the action was recognized, but no action happened.

Normal http links were working, however.

It didn't work well on the smart phone, though

I also tried to access the above setup on my smart phone, but without having a screen keyboard, the usage of a Swing app in the browser is very limited, especially if I rely on entering numbers to a software. Also it seems not to be possible to move windows around inside the browser. At least it was pretty funny to hear the numbers spoken by NC on my desktop audio boxes when I pushed the play sound button on my smartphone ;-)


Summary

In the web browser on the desktop using Webswing, the Swing based app NumericalChameleon is working pretty well actually. It is worth to try it!