About PrismTech Generic Browser Framework

The PrismTech Generic Browser Framework is a framework for object browsers. Object browsers that are managed within the generic framework will be able to use its functionality and share a common look and feel.

Within the framework, an object browser is any graphical user-interface that displays information about a particular object type. As an example, an object browser could display a tree view of the file system or the contents of a particular file.

The framework supports a number of convenient features that make object browsing easy. New object browsers can be launched on the fly either explicitly by clicking the "new" button or by clicking the right mouse button on an object within a browser. The latter will automatically provide a list of all the browsers available for that object type.

The framework graphical user-interface is divided into four areas:

Using the framework should be fairly straighforward. Here is a brief description of the menus and tool bar buttons in the main window: The tool bar further contains a delete button for removing the currently active browser from the framework and a stop button. The stop button may be used by some object browsers to terminate long-lasting operations.

As mentioned above, you can activate a manager window. The browser manager keeps track of all the object browser. Regardless of how many browser windows you have activated, there is just one manager. The browser manager window has three areas:

In order to add a browser mapping to the Generic Browser Framework, you must specify a browser mapping. As an example, a file browser could have a mapping between the java.io.File object class and the com.prismt.browser.examples.FileBrowser browser class. The alias for a browser is the name that will appear in popup menus and the new browser dialog. The mapping information is saved in a mailcap file.

Exporting an application will write the framework including all the contained browsers into a bean. This allows you to customize various aspects of a browser application and save it as a bean for later use. The Generic Browser Framework comes with a bean loader that allows you to activate exported browser applications.

The scope tree is used to group browsers. Only browsers within the same scope will be aware of each other. Please note that not all browsers use the features related to scopes. For an example of browser communication, consider a file browser. If you have two file browsers, you might want want one browser to continuously display the directory selected in the other browser. You can temporarily disable a browser in a scope in order to prevent it from receiving events from other browsers.


Please contact PrismTech Limited for more information.