Oh, yes, I agree with you here. When I started learning XPCOM in order to do some development on the Mozilla platform, it took me some time to understand enough so I can do anything in the right way (I am still not that great). IMHO, XPCOM is great in terms of how much functionality it provides for application development, but just to know that the functionality is somewhere in the million or so lines of code of Mozilla doesn't really help you to find it. There is a lot of documentation, true, but more is still needed to ease rapid development.
Also, much of the documentation is available for the XPCOM interfaces or in the source code itself, but this is a catch 22 situation: you need to know which interfaces to look for in order to get to the documentation. To do this, I suspect the only way would be to browse through the source code a lot or to refer to more experienced XPCOM programmers. Both ways, unfortunately, are time-consuming. Some help is available on XULPlanet: http://www.xulplanet.com/references/xpcomref/ I suspect that people familiar with Microsoft's COM platform would find it easier to understand XPCOM, but I don't know COM either, so I am not sure. You have probably already used those ones already, but here are two resources I found useful: The "nsCOMPtr User Manual": http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/nsCOMPtr.html "Creating XPCOM Components" by Doug Turner and Ian Oeschger: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/book/cxc/ Peter _______________________________________________ dev-tech-xpcom mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-xpcom
