Chapter 5 Pilots

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The pilotsrender content in your application's display area. Each pilot renders a specific MIME type. Your application can support multiple pilots concurrently if it is configured to do so. The following pilots are available:

Pilot	Brief Description
HTML 4	Renders HTML documents according to the HTML 4.01 specification. Also renders XML documents that have an associated CSS or XSLT stylesheet. See HTML 4 Pilot.
Image	Displays images not embedded in HTML. See Image Pilot.
NotSupported	Is called when no other pilot is configured for a particular MIME type. See NotSupported Pilot.
Text	Displays ASCII text. See Text Pilot.

For information on how pilots fit into the architecture, see Architecture.

MIME Types and the storm File

A Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) type is a file identification derived from the MIME encoding system that identifies the content of a file. A pilot renders a specified MIME type. For example, the HTML 4 pilot can display the MIME type text/html.

MIME types and the pilots for use are specified in the storm file located in the ice.storm package in ib6core.jar.

The default storm file maps MIME types to the pilot that is responsible for handling them. For example, if a server returns an HTML file based on a request from the browser, the response typically includes a MIME type of text/html. This ensures that the correct pilot is used for the content type. If there is no supported pilot for a content type, the NotSupported pilot is used.

You can set the ice.storm.storm system property to provide a URL to a file that overrides the default.

By default, all optional pilots except the Flash pilot are configured in the storm file. You can provide a custom storm file that configures only those pilots you are deploying with your application.

Copyright 2005. ICEsoft Technologies, Inc. http://www.icesoft.com