Embedding Internet Explorer GUI in Java Application

Question

let me preface this post by saying that i have seen the javatip66 reference on javaworld.com and that has considerable merit. i may end up using that methodology.
what i would like to be able to do, of course, is to embed JUST the "HTML pane" of IE/Netscape (excluding ToolBar and Address Bar, etc) inside a Java application. i am not an MFC developer, so i'm not sure where to begin looking or if JNI will allow me to hack that dll.--or even if that canvas/panel/whatever can be invoked independently to render a document.
i have several complete, fully working GUI applications that use the javax.swing.JEditor interfaces to display various mime formatted documents (content types such as "text/html" and "text/plain"). unfortunately, the Java implementations of these Editors don't sync with what everyone is used to in IE/Netscape...to the degree that content is intractably mis-displayed (is that a word?)
worst case scenario, i will invoke a new browser to display content, but i would prefer to frame those browsers in my applications. thoughts?
note: one of the primary problems is the the JFC classes support only up to HTML 3.2 which is as good as archaic these days.

Answer 1

i think you just nailed it. i do imagine that this is the correct forum for this, but i could cross-post to the Swing forum. certainly it is going to require switching on the version of Windows. perhaps we can find a general/create a discussion on integrating ActiveX controls in Java. [man, this is just the most bass ackwards thing ever. hate doing this kind of thing, but it's the "state of the world."] (at least until Sun/3rd party gets a reasonable HTML document renderer.)