Scriptlets are a technology born in a short time, and bundled with Internet Explorer 4.0 "as is". Behind Scriptlets, there are interesting previews of a possible new way of programming. The concept of software component lands on the Web, through Dynamic HTML. When it comes to Web components, however, you must worry about things like deployment. Scriptlets are just HTML pages, and there's no specialized tool (at least at the time of this writing) that supports them as a real development platform.
Microsoft FrontPage 98 is the first one in line, but it provides you with nothing more than an editor which recognizes and supports Scriptlets. Much more is needed. For example, we would expect a full-fledged IDE—possibly integrated with the Developer Studio environment, and an automatic wizard to arrange a setup procedure for distributing Scriptlets across the Internet, and not just there.
The packaging of Scriptlets is a topic that today represents one of their major shortcomings. In this chapter, we tried to address the main points for developing such a tool. Furthermore, we proposed a utility that analyzes any HTML page and returns the names of the required files. This utility—called DHTML X-Ray—is not perfect but widely improvable. Nevertheless, it highlights what such a packaging tool should do. What we have done here is:
In addition, we provided also some useful advice on how to embed HTML files in Windows executable modules.