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I am working in a web application using ASP.net and C#.

My target is to check on a desktop application on the client machine .. If it was exist then I should launch it. Else if it wasn't exist, we should download, install and then launch it.

I could develop this module using Java Applet but unfortunately, Google decided to disable NPAPI in September 2015, So the applet will not working on Chrome.

My question is about the Applet alternatives to help me implementing the above scenario ?

Andrew Thompson
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Usama
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  • possible duplicate of [Can a chrome application launch local program?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21661827/can-a-chrome-application-launch-local-program) – smorgan May 28 '15 at 04:41

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Once Google Chrome was the first to announce that they won’t be supporting NPAPI anymore, they were also the first to provide a new architecture in order to rewrite your code to work on their browser. You can take a look on Native Messaging, which “can exchange messages with native applications using an API that is similar to the other message passing APIs”. The problem is that this approach only works on Chrome, is not something that you can adapt to other browsers.

A more useful approach is FireBreath, a browser plugin in a post NPAPI world. Check the words below from one buddy of the project:

“FireBreath 2 will allow you to write a plugin that works in NPAPI, ActiveX, or through Native Messaging; it’s getting close to ready to go into beta. It doesn’t have any kind of real drawing support, but would work for what you describe. The install process is a bit of a pain, but it works. The FireWyrm protocol that the native messaging component uses could be used with any connection that allows passing text data; it should be possible to make it work with js-ctypes on firefox or plausibly WEB-RTC or even CORS AJAX in some way. For now the only thing we needed to solve was Chrome, but we did it in a way that should be pretty portable to other technologies.”

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The only (semi) viable option as far as I can see, is to offer the Chrome user a link to a JNLP file for a desktop application. Then when/if the JWS desktop application starts, have it report back to the server 'loaded OK' and then 'target app. installed/not installed'.

On your server, have a time out for waiting on the client to report back. If it passes that time, presume the client machine does not support Java at all and the user is checking some web service to try and figure out what app. opens a JNLP!

Andrew Thompson
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  • Unfortunately Google Chrome decided to drop support for background actions of external protocols (https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=348640), so from Google Chrome 45 Java Web Start solutions that use background calls won't be supported. – Bru Jul 09 '15 at 10:49
  • @Bru What's a 'background call'? – Andrew Thompson Jul 09 '15 at 21:43
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After searching about the most suitable way to achieve my goal, I think using custom protocols will be a nice solution to access my client applications from the web page.

This solution is used by many companies such as Microsoft (using mailto: to open Outlook application) and Apple (using itms: to open iTunes application).

The following link is a very good link which talk about a custom protocols: https://support.shotgunsoftware.com/entries/86754-How-to-launch-external-applications-using-custom-protocols-rock-instead-of-http-

Usama
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