I'm working on an
applet that needs to break out of the typical applet sandbox for several reasons (printing, accessing a database that lives on a different machine than the webserver, etc...). I'm using JDK 1.2 and the plug-in that ships with the JDK.
The problem is this -- signing the JAR file doesn't automatically grant the applet permission to break out of the sandbox. I really wished it worked like MSIE (I can't believe I'm saying this) -- in IE, if you have a signed CAB file, the browser will prompt the user and ask if they want to trust the program and allow it to run like a local application. With the plug-in, the user has to run the policytool to grant the applet permission.
This is entirely unacceptable for my situation because we have a lot of client users and they're not technically skilled. To ask them to use policytool -- which is itself already a very unfriendly program even for
Java programmers -- would cause support nightmares.
So I need a way to automatically update their policy file so that it gives the applet permission to run. I'll probably have to write a Windows executable to do this.
My question is -- has anyone else done this before? This seems like it comes up a lot in Usenet groups but no one can give any hard details regarding how to solve this problem. Supposedly the next release of the plug-in will work much more like MSIE, but my group can't wait that long.
Any clues? Thanks,
Jim McCabe
jmccabe@pobox.com