You might just want to use VNC.

VNC is a program that allows you to run an X server (or a Windows session) on a server machine, and display the output on a different machine (even one with a different os). That is, it's the graphics equivalent of an ssh server and client.

VNC also has a way to use through a browser. If it's enabled, the VNC server behaves as a https server, where clients can connect and do the operations through javascript. This means that you don't have to install anything on the client machine. The disadvantage of the javascript way is that it's slow, even slower than otherwise.

VNC is secure, and is free software.

As such an application has to be an X server, I don't think you could get good performance if you want to reimplement it in perl. It requires a fast machine (and network too, you can only use VNC on intranet) as is. It would be even slower in perl.

i second the VNC recommendation, but it is not secure. you have to handle the security yourself by SSH tunneling. there is no encryption on the VNC session, it might be hard to decode the stream and reap your passwords, but there's nothing preventing doing so.

Further to that, here's a 'VNC with SSH' tutorial that might be useful: Making VNC more secure using SSH.

If you really want to run an XServer in an applet, I suspect you still need to open your own connection to the server - HTTP itself can handle persistent connections, but any proxies in between will probably not like it. Oh - and use secure sockets.

anyway - it sounded interesting so I googled around a bit and found this X server in Java that apparantly can run as an applet.

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

WeirdX works well. I have used it with xlib apps and with Gtk2-perl apps. The latter sounds like what you want. Be sure to set the proper applet params, though.

Yes, u are correct. I am looking something like Wired X. Problem is I donot know java. I am looking for GTK-perl. Thanx for your timely advice.
cheers Rock

I thought Broadway seemed like such a neat idea, back in 1997-1998, but it seems to have turned into something of a dead-end. I doubt that there are working plug-ins for recent browsers.

I bet you are actually trying to access to some X applications through a web interface. There are toolkits for interfacing to X-applications directly for testing purposes, that might allow you to interface a web app to an X app, but I doubt that such a thing would be a good idea.

If these X-apps have APIs and/or some standard database you could access, there might be some direction there toward a perl/web-app.

Now it has alot of problems, especially with security, which make it useless for general purpose use, because you need to specify a security-cgi location specific to each plug-in. Which means that everyone would have to have a plug-in for EACH different web-site. However, if you read about how it is done, there is a general purpose method for creating plug-ins for Mozilla, and maybe that is what you might want to look into.

But in general, I think it is better to just design a custom app, which the end-users can download and run, connecting to your site through sockets, or your web-server, giving you a GUI connection.

Dear Zentara!
Thanx for your rejoinder. I have to use this application for Network Management Domain, where I am dealing with bandwidth utilization, health of networking devices and many more such things. The catch is, A Network Engineer should be able look various statistics from any remote location. Hence web browser thing is required.
Given you the scenario, I am expect more inputs from you on this topic.
Thanx in advance.

cheers Rock

exit if $ENV{'HTTP_REFERER'} !~ /^https:/;
[download]

EDIT: If what you want is an interface between the web browser and unix shell, bypassing Apache or other web server software entirely, then ignore this post.