A preview of gtk-vnc v0.3.3

Since Dan beat me to blogging about the gtk-vnc 0.3.2 release, I decided to co-opt him for 0.3.3 and post a full two weeks before the release actually happens :-)

The 0.3.3 release will add support for the Tight encoding which is perhaps the most widely supported compressed encoding out there. This was really the last piece in making gtk-vnc a first class VNC client supporting all the protocol options that one would expect a good client to support. Much to my surprise, 0.3.3 will also contain a Firefox plugin that allows a VNC widget to be embedded within your web browser thanks to Rich Jones.

At first, a VNC web-browser plugin may sound like a silly idea. Of course, both RealVNC and TightVNC ship a Java applet VNC client. Clearly, there is demand for embedding a VNC session within a web browser. Besides the obvious concerns about performance, Java applets are severely limited in what they can do. You cannot grab the mouse and you cannot grab arbitrary key events. You really can't build a first class VNC client as a Java applet.

With a gtk-vnc based plugin, you can have a first class VNC client in your web browser. An exciting application of such a technology would be a rich web-based management application for virtualization. Things that were not possible in Java, like full-screening a VNC session, supporting copy/paste and drag-n-drop, are all within the realm of possibility using a gtk-vnc plugin.

There's still a fair bit of work to do to harden the plugin and gtk-vnc, such that it could be trusted to be invoked by any web page, but I'm looking forward to see what this leads to.