Hi Everyone!

Imagine two linux servers running on an aircraft, only one has a screen.

The server with no screen hosts a nice gtk application from supplier A that does everything we want.

From supplier B we have a kiosk application running on the other server. On the screen a browser runs and points to some port on the screen-less server. Clearly, we cannot interact with the gtk application via the browser.
The requirements to the aircraft environment are very strict and cannot be changed. It is not an option to change the kiosk browser architecture in any way. All there is, is a brwoser pointed to some port on another server.

As there is no way to directly have the gtk application run in the browser window, supplier A has ported some of the gtk application to html, claiming at the same time, that the transition from gtk to html makes the application lose functionality (and speed, which I tend to believe).

Questions:
(1) Functionality
I expect the look&feel to be different between gtk and html. Does gtk indeed offer functionality that is not available in html? Which would be the probing questions to ask supplier A?

(2) Other Options
I would imagine that there are options other than plain html to go from a gtk application to something that can serve a GUI to a browser?
High-level stuff like jsp or jsf is not an option, as we won't have tomcat&friends, it will only be an apache server, nothing else. What options are you guys aware of that
-- require just a web server
-- have graphics capability
-- are proven technology
-- are easy to port (...)
-- will work within our framework?


Thanks a lot in advance!

glaubstas

The only thing that really pops into my head is running VNC over HTTP. Since you are on a small network, performance may not be too bad. Certainly not ideal though.

Porting a GTK interface to HTML is absolutely going to make it slower and limit the interface. The basic functionality will be preserved, but it would have to be a much more utilitarian presentation.

Why are you limited to running just the browser on the client side? X works over the network just as easily as on the local machine, you can export the graphical interface of the GTK application from the server to the client, and it would appear that the client was running the program when it was actually executing on the server. This doesn't require any special software or configuration, that is just how X is designed.

and it works right out of the box too, even without running an entire X remotely.

All you need is ssh +X hostb then,once you are logged in, you run the gtk application, and it will on hosta, automatically forwarding the X calls to hosta

Thanks a lot for the reply.

I will check out VNC over HTTP.

The limit is imposed by those building the aircraft, there is no control on the side I am on over this design, unless money is spent in large amounts. This constraint gave me the reason to post this question here...

Just as x_terminat_or_3 has pointed out, using all the virtues of X would be the easiest solution, however, the aircraft manufacturer has indicated that this is not an option and the architecture is going to be just as I described: browser and port, nothing else.

Thanks,

glaubstas