compiling HTML5 to .exe/.dmg - html

I am currently beginning a project where we want to build an Interactive Whiteboard (educational activities) and deploy via CD-ROM. I want to build the project in HTML5 for it's interactivity and then somehow compile it to both .exe. and .dmg so when the CD-ROM is inserted it autoplays the 'Game'.
How is this possible? Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

I already made a project using pure C (WinAPI) on github that can pack HTML files into single EXE using resources.
http://github.com/dns/WinAPI-Embed-Browser/releases
Use: res://programname.exe/test.html as path to access html files from your EXE file.
From here you also can hide the window border & just showing the content of your HTML app, or even running on fullscreen. This is very useful if you want to make interactive CD-ROM.
On Mac, you can use Delphi/Lazarus TWebBrowser control to load html files. However I don't know if mac program can access files from resource or not.

HTML 5 is a browser technology, so I think as long as the pc you are installing on has the latest browsers, installing your app should work fine.
Can you tell us why you want it as a CD-ROM based installation, where as you can easily host it online?

You may not need any .exe wrapping. Here is an approach.
Important: your autorun will be often disabled, [not so] quietly. Provide some instructions for running your application manually.
So:
Google for running a portable version of Firefox or Chrome from a CD. Have the browser prepared. Put it in a [sub]directory representing your CD.
Put your content there.
Create a .cmd file to invoke the browser with a command like,
FirefoxPortable.exe index.html
Create autorun.inf (details googlable) to call the above batch file.
Make a CD image from that directory. There are lots of CD burning applications that can do that.
Test.

Related

How to open a heavy html file

I have recently downloaded my facebook archive, which is a very old account I started in 2009.
There is some conversations I would like to read, the main problem is that messages.html inside the zip weights 98 mo.
Unfortunately,neither mozilla or google chrome can open those 21109 lines of codes in a webview without crashing.
I could open the document with Notepad++, but it's just like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Could you help me please ?
Further to the LINUX comments, we can only assume you are trying to look (or search) inside the html file. You can use any good, text editor like: TextPad, EditPad, etc. You can also download "Unxutils" (not it is not mis-spelled) and use the Windows ports of grep/sed/awk/head/tail/cut etc. There maybe comments or answers posted to use Cygwin which work fine, but require the use of DLL libraries and such. The UnxUtils are stand-alone exe files are work right out of the box with no installation required.
If you are interested in getting some readable files for each conversation you can use the first part of this tutorial which generates csv files which are easily searchable.
http://openmachin.es/blog/facebook-messages

Can we use wxWidget to save a webpage onto the disk

I was using wget with system call (c++) to save a webpage from internet to my HD in a program. Now I want to use wxWidget to do the same. Is there anyway I can do that and still have the generic behaviour of wget? (i.e. i give a link to a pdf file n then a pdf file is saved)
I found this link http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Download_a_file_from_internet
but I have no idea how to convert wxString to a pdf/mp3 file according to the url entered.
Could anyone help please. I am working on an open source project for the first time and I encountered this wxWidget just now
If you are happy using wget with a system call, then why not continue to do so?
wxWidgets is a GUI framework, with a lot of extra convenience functions included. You don't HAVE to use them. You can still use whatever C++ features, utilities and packages that your are familiar with.
Here is a link to Wget for Windows
You can use wxHTTP (as described here) or use wxURL and GetInputStream()

How to create HTML5 100% offline applications?

Sometimes I need to write a small program just to represent some data in a chart, or similar stuff. I have been wanting to do this kind of things through the browser, with HTML5. I think it would be nice to use its canvas to create a nice UI for simple apps.
I have read some articles related to offline applications with HTML5, but they focus on downloading all the data you need and save it to the cache to use it offline later. You even need to set up an Apache server (or similar) to create your app.
I don't need my app to be online, just in my computer. I just want to create a simple application, nothing to do with internet at all.
How can I do this? Is it even possible or worthy? Is there any "Hello world!" tutorial about this around there?
Something like Mozilla Prism would be good for displaying the content as an application.
There's no need to have a web server like Apache for just displaying HTML5/Javascript in a browser. You can just have it all in a folder on your desktop and then load it in the browser with the file:// protocol.
For example file://C:/Documents and Settings/YourUser/Desktop/YourApp/index.html would open an HTML file in a folder called YourApp on your user's desktop.
If you ever find you need to read static HTML+Javascript files locally then I'd recommend using this python command in the console:
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
It launches a simple HTTP server (who'd of guessed) that serves files from the current working directory. Effectively, it's the same as launching an apache webserver, putting some static assets in /var/www/... etc. etc.
You could also just browse to the assets at file:///some/folder; however, most browsers will prevent javascript from using AJAX when files are loaded in that way, which will manifest as a bunch of bugs when you go to load it.

Offline web app for distribution in pendrives (Windows only)?

We are trying to distribute a basic HTML file with some links to a PDF document in a USB drive for advertising purposes. The idea is that an autorun opens up this HTML in the default browser. However, this might not be a good idea since it would look very amateur-ish and we will have to rely on the default browser's technology (which unfortunately has a good chance on being IE6/7!)
We've explored a few alternatives, but we can't find one that really fits what we are trying to achieve:
Mozilla Prism
Altough it seems like it's designed with offline web apps in mind, the executable creates files in the user's AppData directory and it's hard to configure the default paths. Also, Firefox doesn't have a default PDF viewer, so we will have to depend on the user's default PDF viewer (which might be Adobe Reader)
Mozilla Chromeless
Since Prism is inactive, the idea is still developing with Chromeless, which allows the developer to create the browser interface with basic HTML/JS/CSS. The main issue here is that somehow the build isn't loading HTML, all that's showing is a gray iframe. I'm not sure if it's just me, because there's nothing on the issues page.
Portable App
We could throw in the portable version of Firefox or Chrome and customize the XUL for Firefox or open Chrome in app mode.
Firefox's advantage is that it kind of supports relative paths (resource://), but it doesn't have a built-in PDF viewer. Chrome has a very good and lightweight PDF viewer and the built-in app mode is a very useful feature for us, but I can't find how to open a local path without the usual absolute path (file:///C:/) since we don't know what's the drive's letter.
Has anyone figure out how to handle this kind of issues? Thanks.
This has been asked three years ago, but it's unanswered, listed high in Google, and I stumbled over the exact same problem and can imagine that many others that seek to ship portable web apps that can be run locally and with a minimum of dependencies will encounter this issue, too.
The solution I am now going with is the node-webkit.
You can treat it like a portable version of chrome, however it excepts a relative path to your app's entry point, is about 40 MB smaller, and much more customizable than the --app mode of chrome (which isn't customizable at all if I remember correctly).
Github & Download:
https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit#downloads
An extensive guide:
http://thejackalofjavascript.com/getting-started-with-node-webkit-apps/
My usage suggestion for Windows:
First create an app package as explained in the guide linked above
For the node-wekit to load with your app, you need to start it like this:
nw.exe app.package
Where nw.exe is in the root of the zipped folder you downloaded and app.package is a zip file (can have any name) that contains your app data and package.json.
To do this silently, you can use a BAT file containing the (amended) call above and a VBS file containing something like this:
CreateObject("Wscript.Shell").Run "cmd /c launchNW.bat", 0, true
launchNW.bat being the name of your BAT file. Now run the VBS file; a window containing your web app should pop up without the command window appearing with it.
Finish reading the linked guide to learn more about customization options to do things like hiding the browser UI etc.

ImageLoading relative path problem in Flash

I'm trying to load images from a relative folder /media/one.jpg but it never loads, I use the same script to load from my local folder and it does.
The absolute path e.g c:/mydir/one.jpg does not work either. Earlier I used to throw things at my server and get jpegs from there. But for testing purposes I need these images locally available.
Any Idea?
Just solved it Use loadImage("media\ears.jpg"); double slash instead to single and it works :)
For security reasons flash files can access only web or only local files, with can be set in the project properties. If you want to build a web application like a webpage or just a part of a webpage, than you should choose network only, but this way you can test your work only on a webserver (that can be localhost too ). If you want to build a desktop application, witch has no relation to web, then select the "local only" option in your project properties.