[2179] in java-interest
Re: applets running other programs
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas Ball)
Tue Sep 26 16:53:21 1995
Date: Tue, 26 Sep 1995 10:22:57 -0700
From: Thomas.Ball@Eng.Sun.COM (Thomas Ball)
To: graham@pell.anu.edu.au
Cc: java-interest@java.Eng.Sun.COM
> Am I right in surmising that in the latest release of HotJava applets
> cannot invoke other programs?
Yes, you are right.
> While I can see that applets invoking other programs is a security risk,
> I do feel that unilaterally banning it makes applets next to useless.
> A lot of people use the WWW (and thus applets) to interface to existing
> software such as numerical packages, data bases, etc. Allowing an option
> to allow applets to invoke other programs is essential for "communicating"
> with this existing software.
Please don't confuse "invoking" other applications with "communicating"
with them. Applets are free to use sockets to communicate with
applications functioning as servives. One use of applets is as
easy-to-write clients to external servers, such as the software you
describe. If it's not appropriate for that software to be always
running, its invocation can be handled by an inetd server. Protocols
for communicating with these application services can be the same as
that used for pipe communication, since socket connections are as
reliable.
Note that applets are normally used in the context of a WWW browser
(the AppletViewer is actually a tiny, special-purpose browser), where
one can assume the existence of sockets and inetd servers. If you are
writing a standalone application using Java, you *can* invoke other
programs directly. The Java debugger does this to start up a second
interpreter to run the classes being debugged.
Tom
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