the "for the impatient" Squat demo on MacOSX

Giovanni Giorgi jj at objectsroot.com
Sat Mar 27 12:00:36 UTC 2004



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. :)
>

-- 
// Giovanni Giorgi
//   http://www.siforge.org
//





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