188 IBM Content Manager OnDemand Guide
The line data applet is a Java applet that is provided by ODWEK. It is similar to the line data 
viewing capabilities of the Windows client, but it does not contain all of the parallel 
functionality for viewing line data within the Windows client. For example, the applet does not 
support saving and selecting custom views.
The plug-ins for AFP and images are shipped as setup packages, which must be installed on 
the user’s computer. The plug-ins integrate themselves with Mozilla Firefox browsers and 
Microsoft Internet Explorer. The AFP plug-in provides similar viewing capabilities to the 
Windows client. 
The image plug-in can view image files, with the added benefit of displaying TIFF images 
(which current web browsers usually cannot display).
Conversions and transforms
In addition to the viewers, ODWEK uses conversion or transformation engines, which convert 
the document into another data type. ODWEK allows the integration of AFP Transform 
components for converting AFP into HTML or PDF documents, and it provides a generic 
transform interface, which can be used to plug in any conversion or transformation engine.
The transforms apply only to documents that are served by ODWEK. They are available to 
web clients that are based on ODWEK (such as Content Navigator) and to any other 
application that is written by using the ODWEK Java API. They are not available on the 
Windows client.
Web viewing considerations
When you choose a viewer strategy in web clients, it is important to know the differences 
among the viewer architectures:
/SM590000Java applet viewers, such as the line data applet or Content Navigator’s generic applet 
viewer, are downloaded automatically to the user’s computer and run within the browser. 
No deployment is needed, but a Java installation must be present on the PC. They are 
effectively cached on the user computers, and they can provide sophisticated functionality. 
On the downside, each Java applet requires a Java virtual machine (JVM) to run. On 
terminal servers that serve multiple users at once, this requirement might lead to larger 
memory consumption.
/SM590000Plug-in viewers are native applications that must be installed through a setup routine on 
the user’s computer. They integrate with the browser and provide their own viewing logic, 
which can be sophisticated (for example, with the AFP plug-in). 
/SM590000The generic and Ajax viewers that are provided by Content Navigator provide limited 
rendering and viewing capabilities. They do not require any rollout or JVM.
/SM590000Transforms, such as the Ricoh AFP2PDF or other vendor-provided transforms, result in a 
PDF document that is viewed in the Acrobat viewer. Although this viewer is deployed on 
most user PCs, the rendering consumes processing power on the mid-tier system. Also, 
large documents cannot be rendered into PDFs. Because the PDF is displayed by an 
external application, it cannot communicate with the Content Manager OnDemand server 
like the line data applet.