title: Launching a desktop application from a web site
body: <p>Is it feasible to launch an application via a browser / URL?  What are the options for doing this?</p>
  
  <p>I know the way to do it with IE and Windows (which usually doesn't work). Ideally, I would like this to be browser independent.</p>
  
  <p>Our application is RCP, so in theory Java Web Start could work, we would just have to do some significant changes to how we deliver our application to users, which I would like to avoid. Our web server code is currently all Java if that makes a difference. </p>
  
  <p>I pretty much gave up on this until I clicked a url on Apple's site, which in turn launched iTunes.</p>
  
  <p>How does Apple do that?</p>