Rich Text Java Applet as Substitute for <TEXTAREA>? 19
Glowbead asks: "I'm trying to find a java applet that can be used instead of a textarea for use in a Content Management System I'm working on. I basically need something that will let someone who's in charge of managing content to do spot formating (bold, italic, underline, H1, etc) without the need to know any html tags. I've found one called edit-on Pro that looks like it will do the trick from Real Objects. It's a pretty slick little applet that seems to work well under Netscape 4.x, Mozilla, and IE. The only problems are that I've tried for close to a week to get in touch with the company, with no luck, and it's not Open Source. I've also seen a few that are Windows only (dll plugin based). I'd really like to find something like this that is cross platform (as edit-on is) and free (as in speech) so that I can modify it to my needs and so that the whole system could be released at some point in the future. Does anyone know of anything good for this purpose?"
Re:Try doing what Yahoo! does (Score:1)
The input field itself is the ActiveX control, and the UI for rich manipulation is JavaScript.
-JF
Asking /. for help with copy management... (Score:1)
- A.P.
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Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
Mod this up!!! (Score:1)
This always happens... (Score:3)
This always happens to me... When ever i do research on a topic (or am about too), it comes up in Ask Slashdot... must have a mental connection with Cliff... oh well
Anyway, here's what i've found (other than what's already been mentioned)
FuzzCat [mycgiserver.com] -- it seems to work, but A) it's more full featured than i'm looking for and B) i can't seem to find the source code for it... :(
HTML WYSIWYG Editor [siteexperts.com] -- This is a good tutorial on how to write a formatting editor with javascript and IE4+. I think i'm going to use this (combined with some tricks used by Yahoo mail...)
Here r some others (from a german PHP list):
http://www.mycgiserver.com/~fuzzcat/webfile/text/t ext.html [mycgiserver.com]
http://www.secretgate.com/axadir/classic.html [secretgate.com]
http://netword.secretgate.com/ [secretgate.com]
http://www.kalbi.demon.co.uk/winsite/win.htm [demon.co.uk]
http://home.earthlink.net/~hheister/ [earthlink.net]
Stylepad demo (Score:3)
-Dave
Blatant Commercial Plug (Score:2)
On the plus side of commercial software, the server part runs on Linux.
The bummer is no copy/paste (Score:3)
Leave it to the browser designers. (Score:1)
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"Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
Javascript/DHTML will allow you to do this (Score:3)
NS 4.x wil never work this way, however. You can't modify anything in a rendered document except image sources in NS 4.x
There are, as far as i know, no free Java components to do this easily.
There may be commercial ones, and it probably wouldn't take much to write something simple yourself, but Java just sucks on most browsers other than IE (a sad state of affairs), and if youre going IE, then you might as well just use DHTML/Javascript.
You then get the benefit of being able to use Mozilla as well, if it ever attains 'good, fast browser' status, but you should be very careful to write your javascript with this in mind.
Netscape have given up on providing a decent browser, or even supporting their own browser with the DHTML content on their site, and the few people (i'm one of them) who use a Linux-only desktop probably prefer hacking HTML by hand anyway, so it most likely wouldn't surprise anyone if you went IE-only with this project.
DHTML Editor (Score:3)
You could use the ocx version for IE4 if you needed to support that.
However the big drawback is that it is IE only, so probably not good for internet, but ideal for intranet if IE is standard.
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Try doing what Yahoo! does (Score:4)
I imagine it would not be legal to copy it verbatim (though I didn't look for any licensing info) but it shows that it can be done without an applet and could probably be reproduced.
Eprise and Ektron (Score:2)
This is a multi-platform, customizable, programmable product. I don't know how much do they charge for it, but it looks like a good product for your purposes.
You can find the product page at http://www.ektron.com/ [ektron.com]
Try KFC (Score:1)
And an HTML editor with highlighting is one sample applet!!! You'd just have to write something on the server side to lock/save the file.
Re:Try KFC (Score:1)
Just out of curiosity, on which platform did you get this to do anything?
I've tried IE and Netscape on Mac and Windows, and Netscape on Linux and FreeBSD, and none of the applets there worked at all. Mainly just a lot of big grey spaces. The most exciting thing was that Mac IE 5 eventually reports "A connection failure has occurred."
check out dhtmllab.com... (Score:1)
It may still be up there, as I recall it was an early project.
Re:Stylepad demo (Score:1)
I've heard of a proprietary package which does this, but this was long ago and I have no idea where to find this now.
Ekit With Java Swing (Score:2)
One of the drawbacks here is that it needs Java 2, which many browsers don't support. There is a plug-in available from Sun, http://java.sun.com/products/plugin/ [sun.com], that can allow more browsers to support Java 2, but it is something that the user will need to be able to install--and I've found that depending on your audience, you may not be able to be sure they can do that.
Another drawback is that, last I saw, it doesn't have much support for maintaining formatting when copying and pasting from other documents. If the user wants to be able to preserve formatting from a word processing document, you'll need to provide your own solution for allowing them to upload those documents to someplace where you can process them into HTML.
eWebEditPro (Score:1)
Re:Solution: IE and Mozilla specific stuff... (Score:1)