Last modified: 2010-12-27 04:22:11 UTC
I started a discussion on Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) asking about adding support for java applets to Wikipedia. These would be very useful to myself and other physicists in allowing us to use small interactive applets to get concepts across. (I developed one for tidal resonances and then found I could not submit it.) It was suggested that I check bugzilla, which I have done, and make a request here ... . I understand that I need to show a demand for the new facility, so I'll try and show this through WikiProject Physics. In the mean time I understand that I should contact someone in MediaWiki who might be interested in developing the necessary server software. 1. As far as I can see the easiest route is just to add an <applet ... > tag to the html, although apparently this is now depreciated and there a revised tag which does not always work. 2. During the discussion there were concerns about the extra download time involved, the possible extra cpu overhead on PCs and - PC security and the responsibility of Wikipedia.. - For the download time, I thought the best thing to do was to have a javascript box, as is used in Wikipedia for media files, that would only download and start the applet when clicked on. Before that I would just show a suitable starting jpeg image. - CPU and security are more difficult and may require the scripts to be checked but some trusted editors. However there is a java routine to stop processing once an applet is no longer visible. Maybe this should be checked for. Regarding security, the applets should be/are normally run in a sandbox and there may need to be some extra checks to ensure this is done correctly. - Finally there needs to a few checks such as checking that java is available and permitted by the browser and putting up a nice message if this is not the case. If you need more information I can be contacted at djw@soton.ac.uk. Regards, David Webb.
IMO, not gonna happen on Wikimedia for security reasons: sandboxing or not, Java applets can do funny things and this feature WILL be abused.
Moving to extension requests, not going in core MediaWiki.
Looks like there's already such an extension (untested; it looks horribly insecure though, but hosting arbitrary applets probably will remain so anyway): http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Java_Applet Note to original poster -- I've actually been mulling over related issues about how to securely create and link interactive thingies like this, but it may be some while before it's all together and ready to start feeding back to MediaWiki. We'll need to collect some related old bug reports...
