on 28/3/02 12:21 AM, Matt Denton at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I wonder how hard it would be to get an XCMD or XOBJ or DLL to read a > web-browser plug-in? > > Imagine having not only Quicktime inside Rev, but the Flash plug-in > too! I certainly could use Flash components, Qtime is behind with its > embedded Flash version. Wouldn't it be nice to have the latest Flash > inside REV! > > Any ideas? Probably a huge task, but a nice idea...
The plug-in API is published, so it is certainly possible to do - would be much better done within the engine though. As to how hard it is... depending on how you look at it, you could call it easyu, or a long hard road. I added support for the original (Netscape defined) plug-in API for my own multimedia engine some years ago; for Mac and (with the help of a colleague) Windows. It wasn't particularly hard, but it was a matter of doing it by trial-and-fix, rather than just do it and it's done. Many of the call-backs make sense - obviously - in the browser context, so one had to consider the best way to simulate things in one's own context; and in practise, each plug-in tried threw up new issues. This was mostly an experiment, but we did end up shipping one CD-ROM for which it came in useful, because we could license a groovy molecular model viewing plug-in. We just worked with that one, on each platform, until there were no more problems. The result was great - much more functionality than we could have achieved by doing it ourselves - and the time we'd spent was instead generally useful. My guess is that supporting ActiveX style plug-in should if anything be even easier - but I'm bluffing. I think it's an excellent idea. As long as everyone understood that it probably wouldn't be a one-shot, 'this feature is now in' thing; but something that once the basic architecture was in place, would gradually improve as users reported issues with particular plug-ins on particular platforms. But given that, it would probably be a really good bang-for-buck use of the MC team's development time, since there are such a wide variety of obscure plug-ins out there, providing specialised functionality. And yes, the Flash plug-in would be an excellent initial test case to work with, since (a) it would be very useful and (b) because of the capability to pass data back and forth, it would exercise a lot of the issues. Ben Rubinstein | Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cognitive Applications Ltd | Phone: +44 (0)1273-821600 http://www.cogapp.com | Fax : +44 (0)1273-728866 _______________________________________________ improve-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/improve-revolution
