On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Craig Latta wrote:

Hi--

Hi! Sorry for the late response :)

[...]

Getting the web demo of Squat working on MacOSX is turning out to be tricky. Security is arguably better, and certainly different than on win32. :)

On win32 I can rely (at least for the moment) on a request for an .exe file resulting in a choice for the user as to whether to run the file. This is how I run the Squat installer on win32, via a page which does an http-equiv refresh. MacOSX seems determined to prevent web browsers (or at least Safari) from running programs "automatically", with or without user confirmation.

This is the reason because Unix is secure and windows is a virus-dev-platform :D

On Mac OS X you got java installed "for free", so I think you can build a signed applet, send it to safari and use it for downloading a disk image. Then you can try to run (via the Runtime.exec() of Java) something like /usr/bin/open <tempDiskImage.img>

You must play with the sandbox security configuration of an applet to do this...but I think it is possible.

Another (stronger) way is to use java web start, download a zip with the squeak runtime, decompress it and launch it. It is a bit more complicated as far as I know, but it should work well. See at: http://java.sun.com/products/javawebstart

Hope it helps :)

I have a small MacOSX disk image that will automatically transfer itself to the user's machine, but I don't know how to run programs in it without manual intervention on the part of the user, which is decidedly less demo-sexy. :)