Integrating Browser Based Tools

last modified on Jul 28, 2015

Some projects choose to implement most of their user interface using a web-based approach and just implement a thin layer in the TextGridLab. To do so, you can make use of the SWT Browser Control. The browser control lets you display arbitrary websites, observe their load status and changed URLs and it allows you to call JavaScript code on the web site. There is a limited set of simple data types that can be exchanged with the JavaScript functions you call.

However, you should be aware that you will have to deal with different browsers on the various operation systems and that this does not correspond to the user's preferred browser. On Windows, the control will be based on Internet Explorer, on Linux on the WebKit implementation that ships with the OS's GTK library and on MacOS on the webkit implementation that comes with the operating system.

If you follow this approach to edit TextGrid objects, you will typically want to

• implement an EditorPart in Eclipse that features a Browser Control as its UI
• implement the editor input handling by adapting to TextGridObject and passing the object's URL to the webapp displayed in the browser
• call RBACSession.getSessionID() to implement user login and pass the session id to the webapp.

An example project is the RDF input mask developed for the Blumenbach project.