need a web browser in my desktop application

Question

part of the specification of this desktop application is to have a mini browser built in, so that you can enter URL, and navigate the site as you would on a normal browser. Access to the browser page's DOM is required, should let me programmatically change the rendering view of a page, should be cross-platform, renders javascript

JDIC seems outdated and I've heard Mozswing doesn't run on Mac....

Jxbrowser license costs a grand and up.

Is Java the wrong platform to be creating such app? Are there any other solutions out there for building an application like this ?

Thank you.

Answer 1

You can possibly use the SWT browser widget to create a Mozilla browser using XULRunner. This will give you access to the underlying browser to let you do whatever you like with regards to manipulating the DOM. It's a bit complex though.

http://www.eclipse.org/swt/faq.php#whatisbrowser

You can see an example of DOM interaction via XPCOM here: http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/org.eclipse.swt.snippets/src/org/eclipse/swt/snippets/Snippet267.java?view=co