Launching the Application with the Plug-in

Now for the easy part. Once the plug-in is installed on the local machine, users just start the browser and visit your Web site. If the application was embedded on the page, it starts running immediately. If it was included as a hyperlink, the user simply clicks on the highlighted text or image associated with the hyperlink to invoke it. Either way, the browser recognizes ACUCOBOL-GT object files, invokes the ACUCOBOL-GT Web Plug-in, and runs your application in the end user's browser window. Because your program is running inside of a browser, all of the functions accessible through the browser's menu and tool bars are available to the user at the click of a mouse.

If a user tries to start the plug-in again, the second instance of the plug-in searches the system registry for a file type association and tries to run ACUCOBOL-GT as a separate process. If the standard runtime is not found, the following message is displayed:

You may only run one instance of the ACUCOBOL-GT plug-in at a time.

The user must get and install the standard ACUCOBOL-GT runtime to run multiple COBOL programs at once. When the plug-in runs a COBOL program using ACUCOBOL-GT as a separate process, the COBOL program has the same security features as if it were the first instance running in the browser. The IS-PLUGIN field of the SYSTEM-INFORMATION group item is set to 'Y' in this case, but the W$GETURL and W$STATUS library routines are not available. (You can check the RETURN-CODE register to determine whether or not the routine is available. See W$GETURL or W$STATUS for details.)