On 29 Jun 99, at 19:08, Norm Thompson wrote:

> Thanks Dave and Jim for replying.I have tried and tried many times with both
> IE5 and Netscape, without any success ,to load an .exe file within a HTML
> frame .But people say it is possible but they don't know how it is done. Dave
> ,if it is possible to use java to carry out this task have you  or anyone else
> out there any ideas where I might get a script or whatever to do this job.
> Norm Thompson

  I'm pretty sure that if there were any moderately-easy way to do this, we
would already be hearing about sites using it to launch destructive/abusive
programs, ranging from fairly exotic ones like Back Orifice and NetBus to
simple ones like Format, and variations in between.
  .EXE files normally launch (from WIndows) without requiring an association,
so the kind of mechanism that would allow display of .PDF and .XLS files
won't (directly) come into play.  Java includes rules which are *supposed* to
prevent an applet from running dangerous code on the browser's PC.

  It's possible that what you really want is to run some executable on the
*server* that provides, as output, the content you want to display in the
frame.
  This shouldn't be too hard.  While CGI scripts are most commonly written in
Perl, (a) Perl includes a system() function that could run other kinds of
programs, and (b) CGI is the Common *Gateway* Interface, allowing the HTTP
server to call (almost) any external program -- including .EXE.  Note that if
the .EXE you want to run doesn't produce its output in HTML, you may want to
use a Perl script to invoke it, capture its output to a file, and HTML-ify it.
  The main point is that if this is what you are requesting, then you can use
CGI to do it more or less as you would for a Perl script.


David G

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