I am trying to come up with a workaround to cater for Chrome (and Firefox) dropping support for Netscape plugins later this year. Here's the situation now, which works in all browsers:
Server: has CGI, HTML etc with a "Launch" button on the page.
Desktop: has Java program (not applet) consisting of a bunch of jars, the launching of which upon HTML button press is the objective. Also on the desktop client machine is a private JRE and a Netscape plugin residing in each browser's plugin folder (plus, to cater for newer IE's, a pluginhostctrl.dll activex container to allow the NP plugin to run). So, when the Launch button is pressed, some javascript calls out to the plugin Object, and on the client the NP dll calls WinExec to run a small Win32 executable which invokes the private Java runtime with appropriate parameters to run my Java app. A long winded method but it works. The private JRE is crucial - we only want to run the java app against a JRE we have tested against, and we don't want to mandate installation of a system JRE either.
So---when NP plugins disappear I need to find another way of launching a java app against my JRE. That rules out any JNLP or Java WebStart solution as that uses the system JRE (if there is one even).
The only thing I can think of so far is to have the Launch button invoke some Javascript which somehow signals an event on the client, and a background app or service picks that event up and fires up the private JRE/Java app. But I can't find any way of JS communicating an event to outside of the browser eg file write, clipboard write.
Is it worth exploring node.js?
Any other solutions that don't involve a change to the legacy java app?
thanks