Up front: I'm not necessarily advocating use of the SWT browser control as a UI - it was more of a response to some of the concerns expressed about the accessibility of SWT. I've been curious about the accessibility of the SWT browser control for my own purposes - Freedom Scientific won't say that they support it, and I haven't talked to the WindowEyes folks yet - so this seemed like a good opportunity to both throw out a possibly viable option and get some info myself.
Having said that, if you chose to use the SWT browser control you would in essence be writing a web-based braille application, most likely using an embedded servlet container such as Jetty. What you end up with may well be something similar to Google Docs; similar approaches are used in numerous applications, but whether it works for BrailleBlaster would depend on the functionality you want to implement. Our TAMC application uses an embedded Jetty container to render a HTML UI, but it uses a regular browser window (whatever the user's default browser is) and not the SWT browser window. The system default browser can be launched using the Desktop.browse() or Desktop.open() methods in JDK 1.6 and later.
Here's a half-formed possible approach: Much of the back-end functionality of BrailleBlaster (file load/save, search/replace, translation, etc.) would be implemented much as it is envisioned now, except that the user interface would be implemented using some combination of HTML, JavaScript, Java servlets and/or other technologies (UI builders such as Java Server Faces or Freemarker, and/ or a web framework such as Apache Struts, Apache Wicket or even Spring, for example). Editing would be done in an HTML text control or in an ActiveX text editor (not sure about accessibility in this case, but there are lots of options out there), with buttons, checkboxes, and other controls implemented using HTML. It's possible to call Java from JavaScript inside the SWT browser control, so if you need an immediate reaction to the changing of control state you should be able to do it with Java if JavaScript isn't enough. For multiple views you would probably open multiple SWT shells, each with its own browser control.
There are lots of code snippets for the browser control at http://www.eclipse.org/swt/snippets/#browser , and the SWT example set includes a BrowserExample application which can be downloaded from http://help.eclipse.org/helios/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/reference/api/org/eclipse/swt/browser/package-summary.html
Hope this helps... Cheers Chris On Feb 2, 2011, at 3:22 AM, John J. Boyer wrote:
Chris von See, could you elaborate on your idea of making the framework of BrailleBlaster in SWT and presenting the GUI content with html in thebrowser control? When it is asked to produce UTDML liblouisutdml produces output in Daisy xml format. This would work ni cely with a browser if we have a way of presenting the menus and the Daisy and Braille views. What does the SWT browser control do if it gets a text file? Thanks, John -- John J. Boyer; President, Chief Software Developer Abilitiessoft, Inc. http://www.abilitiessoft.com Madison, Wisconsin USA Developing software for people with disabilities
