Another seperateframe workaround?

Question

I'm working with seperateframe=true. I need the close the first browser window when the other window closes. I've seen the close html page but we have a lot of forms and some are modal, others are not, some are both. So trying to figure out when to call that close html page may be difficult. Plus it's one more thing we have to remember to do when creating new forms and a lot of our testing department's time will be spent verifying all the scenarios.
I've been toying around with the applet properties and javascript. I suppose someone has already looked into this since it's not posted anywhere, but is there some property of the applet that I can poll on occasion (maybe every 2 seconds or so) to see if the applet is done.
I placed a button on my basehtml page that fires off this alert (aApplet is retrieved using getElementById(...) and passed off to this method).
function alertApplet(aApplet){
        alert("active    = " + aApplet.isActive()+ "\n" +
              "doc base  = " + aApplet.getDocumentBase() + "\n" +
              "locale    = " + aApplet.getLocale() + "\n" +
              "accesskey = " + aApplet.accesskey + "\n" +
              "code base = " + aApplet.getCodeBase() + "\n\n"+
              aApplet.getAppletInfo());          
    }but none of the properties change, even after i call aApplet.destroy() except isActive() which changes all the time and isn't what I need but I was hoping it might go to null when the applet was done.
My other thought was that there might be a way to find when the Forms Developer Runtime window closes by watching the processes on the client or something like that.
Another thought was that the other window would be some kind of child of the first browser window and there might be a way to find out when it has died.
Lastly, if by chance I did determine which forms needed to call the close html file, could I automate the editing of the form using that Java API thingie for forms? Don't really need to know how, I can find that out later, just wondering if it was possible.
It seems that Oracle could have provided an event or a method that the Applet could have called when it was unloading so that it could be caught in the javascript and handled much more easily than this. I have very little js/applet experience but everything I've read tells me this could work. Is it something that could be brought to Oracle's attention so that it could be implemented in the future?
Thanks for your time(this was a rather long winded post), any help is always appreciated even though I realize this is probably more philosophical than anything else.

Answer 1

Just for closure. We support only Internet Explorer and Windows clients. This made this solution feasible for us but it probably won't work for most people. I thought I'd share none-the-less since this is such a sore point.
We created a VB6 wrapper around Internet Explorer. This wrapper goes to the URL for the Oracle Forms application. The app never shows IE to the end user, just a special splash screen. Once the Forms app fully loads the vb6 app grabs the handle to the window, maximizes the "forms" window then hides itself. It then waits for the "forms" window to close so that it can close itself. This effectively nutrualizes the window containing the applet. It allows us to close the "applet" window w/o editing all of our umpteen hundred forms that you can exit the application from. It allows us to hide the "applet" window from the user so they don't accidently close it prematurely or have to deal with a useless window in thier task bar.
I had to do a lot of tricky stuff to get this to work, and it does require an extra component that all the client machines have to have, but it is very light weight and doesn't require any installation on a default xp install.
Another cool thing about doing things this way is that we now have a vb app that has direct control over the window that forms is running it. This gave us some cool advantages. We are now able to fully maximize the "forms" window when the application loads so that the status bar isn't missing from the bottom(there is some bug or something that when you use set_window_property and maximize, the status bar doesn't appear).
Just thought I'd share my approach to the problem. Hit me up if you want any more information.