Sharing Java Applet Sessions in Firefox

There is a known problem in JEP (Java Embedding Plugin) for Firefox in which new sessions (or no sessions at all) are used for every new Java applet request to a servlet. This can be problematic for applets that requests data or URL from a servlet requiring authentication or a login. To get around this problem, you can pass in the current HTLM document's cookie as a Java applet parameter, and then use the cookie in the HttpServletRequest's Cookie request parameter.

In your HTML applet code, just add the document's cookie as a parameter. (Note that I'm writing the HTML applet code in JavaScript to dynamically get the document's cookie.)


<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
   document.write("<embed");
   document.write("name='MyApplet'");
   document.write("type='application/x-java-applet;version=1.6'");
   document.write("code='org/puguasoft/examples/MyApplet.class'");
   document.write("codebase='/applets/'");
   document.write("browserCookie='" + document.cookie + "'");
   document.write("</embed>");
-->
</script>


Then in your servlet, use the browserCookie parameter value as the Cookie property in the HttpServletRequest.

import javax.swing.JApplet;
import java.net.URL;
import java.net.URLConnection;

public class MyApplet extends JApplet{

   public void doIt(URL url){
      URLConnection urlConnection = url.openConnection();
      String cookie = getParameter("browserCookie");
      urlConn.setRequestProperty("Cookie", cookie);
      urlConnection.connect();

      // Now you can do what you need with the URLConnection
      // (e.g. open up an InputStream to read the data)
      // using the same cookie session.

   }
}


For more information check out these postings:

• http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1265.html
  
• http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1414542&group_id=107955&atid=649116
  
• http://lists.apple.com/archives/Java-dev/2006/Mar/msg00278.html
  
• http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1298604&forum_id=371125
  
• http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1634825&forum_id=371124