Irregular Netscape crash affected by monitor resolution
PJ Tenn
I am writing a signed Terminal Emulator Applet for a client. The Applet has
three sessions, and these sessions reside in a CardLayout. The user can
switch between these sessions by clicking on buttons that use JavaScript to
call a public method within the applet to bring a particular session to the
forefront and set focus on that session (so that the user can begin typing
input without having to click on the session with his/her mouse).
The Applet crashes frequently and locks the entire browser. The crashes
have not been reproducible with much reliability, as they vary from test
machine to test machine. I have redirected System.err to a textfile on the
client machine and successfully seen exceptions written to this file.
However, when the Applet crashes, there is no exception written to the file.
This problem occurs in Nescape 4.x (JVM 1.1.5). The problem does not occur
in IE. However, IE is not a possible solution, as the client has
standardized on Netscape. The Java Plug-in is also not a possible solution,
as we frequently call the Applet's public methods using JavaScript.
On one machine, we were able to make the Applet crash by switching sessions
consistently. The user's monitor was set to 1280 x 1024. However, when we
set res. to 800 x 600, the Applet no longer crashed. On another occasion,
we found that the Applet was crashing every time it went through a logon
process (all three sessions are automatically logged onto a mainframe and
the sessions are switched back and forth as they log on) on a particular
user's machine. The only way we were able to make it stop crashing was to
minimize the browser window containing the Applet
Someone told me that there is a bug with the Netscape JVM that causes the
browser to crash if focus is set on an AWT component that is repainting.
Does anybody either have more information about this or know where I could
find this info? I did try removing the calls to setFocus(). However, the
Applet still crashed. Could calling CardLayout.show(sessionName),
attempting to bring a different session to the forefront while the present
session was repainting cause a crash?
I am at wit's end and have been struggling with this problem for a long
time.
Thank you very much in advance.
P.J. Tenn