I am looking for a way to display html forms with javascript on an embedded box with a framebuffer.
I don't need a browser - this UI will feed the forms to a web server on the same machine, and get the pages locally as well, so I could hack up a pipe between the two if needed. I don't need popups, surfing, cookies, ssl, printing, or any of the other stuff that browsers do.
Does anyone know of something that will work or that we can use a starting point?
Use a ready-to-run browser if you want to save work. :-)
Not every browser supports popups, scripts, ssl or whatever.
Links supports the framebuffer for output in graphics mode, so you can take a look there. If you really only need your forms, you could take lynx or whatever in some form of text console.
But if you want to write your own code - this is up to you.
The big sticking point is the javascript. The only embeddable, FOSS browser that supports JS and forms we've found is Konqueror, and it is dog-slow on our little platform.
Except that links doesn't do javascript. The Javascript implementation is partial, and the code is a mess. (And I am Czech, so I can even read the comments - but the code is still a mess.)
That is of course a problem. Btw: What do you mean by "FOSS"? The only way I see right now would be to find a browser which suits you needs (Konqueror doesn't and any other cannot be found), write your own (horrible job), or switch to something server-sided (like php or something).
Maybe there is an javascript-interpreter which runs as a pipe, then you could feed the scripts through this interpreter and afterwards put it onto the screen (links might be applicable there).
take
I never looked through the sources (cannot program C), so I don't know anything about it. But someone got it running on Tuxbox (Linux on a PPC settop-box) and it worked somehow, so it should work on everything :)
If you can remove the javascript code from your forms (or reduce it to something links understands), you have that opportunity. But if that's not possible, I don't think you can avoid that.
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