On Thu, 06 Sep 2001 04:00:17 -0400, Mike Shaver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> To answer your Subject: line: no. There is no real shared-memory or
> cross-process marshalling support in XPCOM, though it wouldn't be unwelcome.
I read that BlackConnect would provide this service? I haven't seen much
activity out of them as of late though.
> But your scenario is a little different, I think: if I understand
> correctly, you want the download manager to register a component when it
> starts up, and unregister the component when it shuts down -- except
> that it wants another process to do the registering and unregistering!
I guess that's one way to do it. I was thinking, to relate the subject line
back in again, more along the lines of the downloader, as a separate
process, registering handlers across the process boundary with mozilla,
with the handler code running in the downloader's process.
> We certainly have some of the pieces in place; XPCOM can handle
> (un)registration of new components at just about any time, and we have
> various ways (X-Remote, DDE, etc.) to instruct the browser to Do
> Something. You might be able to pull it all off by using X-Remote to
> instruct the browser to visit a privileged JS document, which would then
> do all your registration magic. On shutdown, the download manager would
> send the browser to another URL, this time to unregister the handlers.
That's a little kludgy, but not really worse than my original thought for
a possible impl, which was to have a component registered with mozilla
that would have it's own way to communicate with the download handler,
and pass out download info.
Funnily enough that's what we've actually done, though we weren't thinking
of doing anything originally. :-)
Galeon's download subsystem gives the user the choice of using the built-in
mozilla downloader, using GTM through CORBA or running a commandline app
like wget. We successfully isolated all the dependent code and made a standalone
module for mozilla which now actually works and will pass the download out to
GTM using CORBA.
It's kinda cool, though we're not really doing serious work on this, as we want
to get to 1.0 before doing serious re-architecuring.
--phil
