Web Browser Components for Java?

coonsta queries: "Being able to embed a Web browser is critical to the success of a platform (and the browser). High Stakes, No Prisoners argues this quite eloquently. Windows has an embeddable IE (and Mozilla to boot); Linux has Mozilla; wxWindows has wxHTML; etc. But what does Java have? I can forsake cross-platform support and embed IE, but that won't interact well with Swing; I can embed Mozilla, if Webclient is ever released in a usable form (and what about OS X?); I can use a JTextPane, and forget about nice-looking pages or script; I can Runtime.exec the browser and forget about being able to control it or interact with it; I can use CalPane and forget about JavaScript; or I can buy a component from Company X-dot-com, and subsequently price the software out of the market. Do any developers know if I can have my cake and eat it to? That is, does anybody know of a cheap, cross-platform Web browser component for Java with a reasonably modern feature set?"

Comments

One of the great lost opportunities

[fm6]

Sun made many mistakes during its big Java push. One of the biggest was their failure to implement a decent HTML viewer in Java. Instead they gave us HotJava. A classic Java app. Trivial to port to a new OS, but utterly useless once you got it there.

Re:Swing

[gnovos]

YUCK! Do NOT try and use Sun's HTML rendering swing components unless you don't need any more sophistication than can be provided in a slashdot comment. Once you go past bold, italics and font colors, you start seeing serious glitches in the rendering code. Like try putting INPUT tags inside of a TABLE... OUCH! IT will start placing ing INPUT tags randomly all over the screen.

It was a nice idea, adding the HTML to the swing components, but unless they are going to actually do it right then it's useless.