Firefox and Java/SCORM issues

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Our LMS uses Java applets to transmit SCORM data back and forth between learning activity and the LMS. Sometimes this causes problems, because Java security on various browsers is increasingly strict. However we can usually keep IE 6, 7, 8, Firefox on PC and Safari on the Mac working.

Mac-Firefox is usually somewhat problematic. In the past, learning modules would not launch at all using Firefox on the Mac, then recently they started launching but with incomplete learner data being transmitted.

Thanks to Peter Miles, on the Moodle tracker site, I think we finally found a solution. I have no idea why it works, but it does work.

There are two applets that talk to each other. One is in thin the window containing the learning activity. To make it work I simply shifted the “codebase” atribute to AFTER the “code” attribute in the APPLET tag.

The original code was: 

<APPLET code="org.adl.lms.client.DocentAPIAdapterApplet.class"
archive="${getScormCodebase()}/apiadapter_lms.jar"
codebase="${getScormCodebase()}"  src="${getScormCodebase()}"
height=0 id=API name=API width=0
MAYSCRIPT>

The new, working code reads:

<APPLET codebase="${getScormCodebase()}" src="${getScormCodebase()}"
  code="org.adl.lms.client.DocentAPIAdapterApplet.class"
  archive="${getScormCodebase()}/apiadapter_lms.jar"
  height=0 id=API name=API width=0
MAYSCRIPT>
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