From kde-devel  Fri Jul 02 07:46:51 1999
From: Lars Knoll <knoll () mpi-hd ! mpg ! de>
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 1999 07:46:51 +0000
To: kde-devel
Subject: Re: Easy to use components
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=93089862703053

On Thu, 01 Jul 1999, Kurt Granroth wrote:
>I used an ActiveX component for the first time yesterday (<excuse>I had to
>get the product working in under and hour and it had to be a Windows app (in
>the project-requirements)</excuse>).  I almost hate to say it, but I was
>impressed!
>
>What I needed to do was embedd a web browser into my app.  Mind you, an HTML
>widget would *not* have worked as the browser needed to take care of such
>things as the proxy and downloading the pages as well as displaying them.
>I used the MS Internet Explorer ActiveX component to do this.  Here are
>all the steps I took to do so in VC++5:
>
>1) Click on Project->Add Components.  Select WebBrowser control from HUGE list
>   of components (all with descriptions).  Decide on name for the wrapper
>   class (CWebBrowser)
>
>2) Go to the dialog editor (my app was dialog based).  I see a cute icon on my
>   tools bar for the browser component.  I select it and do a click-n-drag
>   to put it on my dialog in the size that I want.
>
>3) I go to the class-wizard and associate a member variable for that component
>   (CWebBrowser m_browser)
>
>Mind you, I have not written one *single* line of code, yet.
>
>4) I go into my dialog class (CGpsDemoDlg) and add this to the init function
>   m_browser.Navigate("http://www.pobox.com/~kurt_granroth", ..).
>
>5) I compile and run.  Voila!  I see my home page displayed in my app.
>
>Wow!  One line of code to have an entire embedded web browser!  Of course,
>there are tons more options that you can set (and I did, later), but the fact
>that you can do sooo much with so little effort is incredible.
>
>Just some food for thought when we think about using KOM/OP.  Can we get it to
>be that easy?

I think, we can get it almost that easy even without using KOM/OP. I once had a
thought about implementing a browser class in khtml, which does almost
everything for the user. But for that khtml will need to link against libkio.
Then one could perhaps do something like:

	KHTMLBrowser m_browser;
	m_browser.load(my_url);
	m_browser.show();

to get a HTML window in you app. The question is then, howmuch should it do by
itself? Should it follow links if a user clicks onto it, etc...

Another possibility is to use konqueror for showing your page, but you probably
wanted to embed it into some widget...

Cheers,
Lars