Viewing HTML inside Applet without using JEditorPane

Question

Hello,

I have a small (500kb) swing applet that displays very simple/limited set of small HTML page(s) inside it with JEditorPane, however this does not seem to work 100% fluently, some customers get a blank page displayed without any java exceptions. The page works OK from my machine. I need a more reliable way to show HTML page to all our users.

Any ideas if there is a small + free class to use instead of JEditorPane OR is there an easy fix to make it more reliable (non blank)

private JEditorPane m_editorPane = new JTextPane();


    m_editorPane.setEditable( false);

    m_editorPane.setBackground(new Color(239  ,255, 215));
    m_editorPane.setBounds(30,42,520,478 );
    m_editorPane.setDoubleBuffered(true);
    m_editorPane.setBorder(null);

    m_editorPane.registerEditorKitForContentType("text/html", "com.xxxxx.SynchronousHTMLEditorKit");


m_editorPane.setPage(ResourceLoader.getURLforDataFile(param.trim()));

Answer 1

AFAIK, JEditorPane is a very primitive HTML component: it is confused by CSS and knows nothing about JS.
I doubt you will find a "small + free" class doing better, HTML parsing and displaying isn't a simple business, even less today.

Perhaps it is better to let the big names in the business to take care of this task, ie. using Internet Explorer or Mozilla components (depending on what is available, etc.): JDIC: Embedding a Web browser in Java.

Answer 2

Although I haven't used it before, Lobo is an open source web browser for Java with support for HTML 4, Javascript and CSS 2.

Compared to the JEditorPane which only has support of HTML 3.2, it seems like Lobo may be a better bet for loading modern web pages.

Answer 3

I've recently POC-ed several java HTML rendering solutions. We decided on JEditorPane because we really need to minimize the size of our jar and it's built into Swing. However, the best library I came across was Flying Saucer. It doesn't have any js support but it's rendering quality and api is top notch, and it's "free" (LGLP), 100% Java, and only about 1mb (still too big for us, but small compared to other options). However, it only renders strict XHTML (all attribute values have to be quoted, all tags properly formed), but that may be OK depending on your needs (and HtmlCleaner or some other such utility may help towards that end).