LabVIEW
Display a web page on the front panel?
This is not very likely happening. Writing a webbrowser control is a huge project in itself and one you can't really tackle to the satisfaction of every possible user. With all the possible extensions to the http protocol such as encryption for security related appications, Java, and all kinds of plugin integration, official HTTP and Microsoft and others HTTP flavors differences, you are bound to create a control that will always fail some users. Companies have tried developing webbrowsers not doing anything else and have mostly failed. A web browser implementation by NI would have to be much more limited than any of the others out there and still might slurp up half of the LabVIEW developer crew, who could do many more interesting things really related to LabVIEW instead.
@falkpl wrote:
I only wish NI would provide a LV native web-browser allowing for platform independents, especially with the migration to new platforms like embedded processors.
Paul
Rolf Kalbermatter
There are quite a few issues with this. Firefox and Mozilla are both owned by the Mozilla Foundation. But as an Open Source project there are literally thousends of copyright holders on that code. I'm not familiar with the particularities of the Mozilla Open Source license and don't know if Mozilla ever has granted a license to a third party to integrate its code base into a commercial project and if it is likely to do that again, but I would bet that the legal issues involved with something like that are huge.
@Tomi M wrote:
I have no need for web browser, but I don't agree with Rolf Kalbermatter. It's true that you (NI) cannot write a web browser of your own. It's too large a project and it's not a core comepetence area of NI. But in these situations companies normally license technology from those companies that work in the area. I suppose it wouldn't be such large a problem to license for example Firefox browser and mozilla UI engine to be a separately priced labview toolkit. That would bring support for mozilla UI discription language to labview as well (Is it XUI?) This XUI(?) would allow one to go beyond labview native front panel objects on platform intependent manner.
Also just because you integrate that engine into LabVIEW, there is no guarantee that XUI would be available in LabVIEW as well, actually I'm pretty sure that wouldn't be possible without completely redesigning the current LabVIEW control widget library and its code, since they are all completely implemented by LabVIEW itself. Besides I'm not sure what added value such a widget library would give in respect to the currently available controls in LabVIEW but it certainly couldn't replace them as it misses quite some LabVIEW specific controls.
Then there is the fact that LabVIEW 8 is already 17MB just for the executable. Adding even just the Firefox engine without to much extras would blow it up for maybe another 5 MB and would require quite a few external DLLs too which need to be distributed with every single application. And integrating it in LabVIEW directly would als mean you can't upgrade to the newest version of Firefox if a serious bug is found.
Last but not least there is a Mozilla ActiveX control which does allow you to integrate the Mozilla Browser (I think no such thing for Firefox currently exists) into a LabVIEW front panel through the ActiveX node just as you can embed the MS IE. I'm not sure how you could embed this on other platforms. There unfortunately isn't a common and widely accepted and supported standard such as ActiveX for other platforms. But embedding really is the only way to integrate a thing like a web browser into other applications. Adding it directly to the code base has simply to many legal and technical issues to have a chance to be a success.
Rolf Kalbermatter
