My Adventure in Component Land

By | November 24, 2005

I found a post on the Creator forum asking how to integrate a embedded Windows Media Player into a Creator project.

So I thought, that would be a good time to try and write some custom components.

You could add some elements as static HTML but then the JSF framework would not know anything about it and you would not be able to to change the parameter programmatically from the application. So that’s not a good idea.

Edwin has kind of a tutorial on how to write a component library at his wiki page.  So I took some time and played with it.

That’s a screen shot of the result;-)

I would not try to put both, an embedded Windows Media Player and a Real Player onto the same page;-) That might get a bit noisy.

Here is a link to my components. They are not fully tested and might not be complete, but I hope they can work as a starting point for somebody;-)  The download contains all the sources and a prebuild complib in the dist directory.  Just import that complib into a Creator 2 EA with the Component Library Manager and you should be ready to play with it.

I’m normally working more on the backend of Creator, so maybe on Monday our component guys will tell me what I did wrong;-)  But I think the results are not that bad for five hours play time;-) Especially given that I normally don’t even work on Windows;-)

Have fun & a good turkey đŸ˜‰
— Marco

9 thoughts on “My Adventure in Component Land

  1. Sheng Gu

    Hi Marco,
    Is it possible to display media from blob or byte data in db table? Thank you.

  2. Marco Walther

    It should be possible but not that easy. The players expect some URL where to fetch the media. So your app would have to the data on a certain URL. That should work for smaller media stuff but don’t expect any container to be a good streaming server.

  3. Sheng Gu

    Hi Marco,
    I will try to work on it to display media from byte data, but why do you think “it should work for smaller media stuff but don’t expect any container to be a good streaming server”. Thank you.

  4. Marco Walther

    As long as you stay with http transport, the container will probably be OK. But it does not support real streaming like RTSP etc.

  5. Darrin

    Just tried to get this to work with NetBeans 6.7. The component drops just fine but does not display at runtime.
    Any thoughts?

  6. Marco Walther

    Darrin, I don’t know. This was written against JSF 1, possibly even prerelease versions. I moved far away from that area now, so I can’t help you much here.

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