Installing a Local Protocol Handler

This page shows an example of how to create and locally install a simple protocol handler in the HotJava^TM Browser.

For example, suppose your company (called foo) wants to install a protocol handler called run. Once installed, this protocol will enable your HotJava Browser users to specify a URL of the form run:applet in order to run an applet in a new HTML page.

For this example, let's assume a developer at foo.com is building this new protocol handler. Before installing it in foo.com's main Java class library, she wants to test it locally. To do so, she puts it in a convenient place in her local file system, adjusts her java.protocol.handler.pkgs property to include the package prefix (all but the run part of the package), and makes sure that the location of her local protocol handler is reachable through the CLASSPATH environment variable. Here are the steps the developer would follow in more detail:

1. Create directories.

Create the directory structure where your protocol handler will live, such as: classes/COM/foo/protocol/run.
By convention, the directory structure starts w