• UI Engine as a helper
• Applet Support
• Custom Web Server Support
• Launching ULC Application servers

The ULC distribution provides Web Integration in various forms. The only infrastructure needed to run ULC applications on a user's machine is a Web browser with access to the Intranet.

Note: This document assumes the reader has already read the Installation section as well as the Running the samples section.

A helper application is an application that is registered with the Web Browser to be launched whenever a specific MIME type is encountered.
The UI Engine can be run as a Helper application for a configured ULC MIME type.To add the UI Engine as a helper application follow the instructions in:

• Configure Netscape Navigator for ULC if you are using a browser from Netscape.

• Configure MS Internet Explorer for ULC if you are using Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

After configuring the UI as a helper a useful side effect (on the Windows platform only) is that clicking on any file with the extension .ulc will cause the UI engine to start and attempt to connect to the application referred to within this file.
For example:

1. Create a file named dossier.ulc.
   
2. Within this file enter the parameters you want to pass to the UI engine.
   eg: -m -url ulc://localhost:8001/Dossier
   
3. Save this file.

If you now start the dossier application as a server on port 8001 and then double click on the dossier.ulc file a connection will be established to the dossier server.

If the dossier.ulc file is referred to as a hyperlink inside a web page then clicking on the link would start a connection between the UI Engine running as a helper to the ULC application server. In addition if you use the Ulc Http Server you can replace the hostName with $WEBHOST and the Ulc Http Server will fill in the host name that it is running on.
eg: -m -url ulc://$WEBHOST:8001/Dossier
 

The UI Engine can be run as a Java applet after being downloaded from a regular Web server. However, with today's browsers there are still some installation steps necessary.

We provide a ULC Applet Implementation that requires the latest releases of Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

All ULC applications can run using a standard web browser and server.When using a standard web server a web page must have a hardcoded reference to the application server host. This means every time a new installation is made the web pages need to be modified to point to the new web/application server location.

To avoid having to modify web pages every time the web/application server is run from a different machine, the ULC distribution includes a custom web server. The ULC Http Server parses any requested web pages with the extension .uhtml and .ulc and replaces the $WEBHOST token with the hostName of the machine running the Http server. Most commercial web servers provide some token replacement functionality which could be adapted for this purpose or the same functionality could be added by writing a Java servlet or a CGI program that performed this function.

In earlier releases of ULC the ULC Launcher was used to start and stop ULC applications on the application server. The ULC launcher is now obsolete and the recommended mechanism to start and stop servers is by writing a ULC application that will perform this task. The Application Controller is one such application that can be used to launch applications on a web/application server.