Alternative Access to Java Applet Network Application
Chrome is on the verge of breaking NPAPI compatibility permanently, and IE, breaking with ActiveX, the future of Java applets is dark. We are currently heavily using a secure client organization applet that allows our users to upload a bunch of files from their file system to our servers with the click of a button. The applet has full access to any configured drive, including network drives.
With the imminent death of the applet, this function will be lost unless we find an alternative. I've already tried to look into various solutions, including the chrome FileSystem API, but is currently only available for Chrome ( http://caniuse.com/#feat=filesystem ) and has limited access.
Does anyone know of an alternative to support the much appreciated functionality? Unfortunately, we are required to support browsers up to IE8.
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In light of the answer provided by Uli Marins, I have researched the options suggested. Unfortunately, these options were not viable for our application as our users' mayor's office does not have sufficient rights to install third party plugins. Also, the API is still in beta, which won't be of any use in a stable production environment.
The main problem that we wanted to solve was the inability to delete files from accessible folders. It seemed that one of the mayor's goals in removing NPAPI support was precisely to prevent this from happening. Therefore, we needed to reduce our goals to a simple solution that was still acceptable to our users, with additional training on how to manually clear the selected folder (since most of our users are almost computer illiterate and need to access network folders).
The long answer is short. The requested solution is simply not possible and must be replaced with a simpler solution and additional training.
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I wrote a post about this here .
As soon as Google Chrome was the first to announce that they would no longer support NPAPI, they were also the first to provide a new architecture to rewrite their code to work in their browser. You can take a look at Native Messaging, which "can communicate with native applications using an API that is similar to other messaging APIs." The problem is that this approach only works on Chrome, not something that you can adapt to other browsers.
A more useful approach is FireBreath, a browser plugin in the NPAPI world. Check out the words below from one project buddy:
"FireBreath 2 will let you write a plugin that works in NPAPI, ActiveX or Native Messaging, it's close to being ready for beta testing. It doesn't have any real paint support, but it will work for what you describe the installation process. is a bit of a pain, but it works FireWyrm protocol which uses native messaging component can be used with any connection that allows text data transfer, it should be possible to make it work with js-ctypes on firefox or plausible WEB-RTC or even CORS AJAX in a way. At the moment the only thing we needed to solve was Chrome, but we did it in a way that is fairly portable to other technologies. "
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