java桌面程序与服务交互,桌面应用程序如何与Web应用程序进行通信？

I've got a desktop EXE application and a GWT webapplication running on a Java appserver backend. How can I do things in the desktop app like click buttons which do something in the webapp? We can fire up a browser, but what about further interaction after that?

If the user switches back to the desktop app and does something, can we get the browser back on top when we need it to?

They are both connected to the same backend application server, so communication via server could be possible for the other way around (webapp to desktop app).

Update

We are checking out an applet inside the web application: with some permissions set, it can communicate on the local user's network to talk to a wrapper for the existing desktop application. We'll see how that goes in terms of responsiveness.

解决方案

You can expose the functionality of your server application through web-services. SOAP or REST are standard. Then you can invoke these services from the desktop client. With Java, these are covered by JAX-WS and JAX-RS. Which have multiple implementations. Metro, Jersey, CXF, RESTEasy.

Technically, you can write browser extensions that can communicate with your desktop app, and in turn modify / interact with the pages, but that would be harder to create and maintain.