About the wbapplet
The workbench applet (wbapplet.jar) allows the full Niagara stack (or a subset of it) to download to a client machine using a web browser with the Java plug-in (required). Once loaded to the client, workbench runs as an applet within an HTML page. To create this full-featured workbench browser, the primary network traffic involved is the initial applet and module download. The download sequence is as follows:
- Based on the login-identity, an html file (see Figure 4-1) is opened in the browser.
Figure 4-1 WbApplet call embedded in html file
- The
wbapplet.jarfile downloads to the browser host and directs the required modules to download to the browser cache, as shown in Figure 4-2.
Figure 4-2 WbApplet call embedded in html file
The total number of modules that are downloaded is variable, depending on the workbench profile that is downloaded. For example, if the host station does not have the weather service loaded, then the weather module is not downloaded. Additional modules may be downloaded and cached as you navigate to different pages in the browser. However, each module only needs to download once, since it is cached. Module file sizes vary from 2 kilobytes for the smaller ones to over a megabyte for some of the larger modules. You can see the individual file sizes under the NiagaraAX installation modules directory of your AXSupervisor workstation.