Hello,
not trying to cross-post, but I tried to post in plug-ins group, but
otoh I am not sure, maybe xpcom group is appropriate. I would like if
anyone could give any hints - it would be much appreciated.
Here's original post I posted to plug-ins group:
And thanks for possible answers ...
----------------------------------
Hello,
first - what is REBOL? REBOL is very cool and small language (look at
http://www.rebol.com ), created by Carl Sassenrath, author of AmigaOS.
Well, but I am not advertising here, so I better explain why I
subscribed here.
The thing is, we would like to create REBOL/View browser plug-in. We
have some initial version for IE running, but many folks wants
Mozilla/Opera plug-in too. So, Rebol Technologies provided us with
rebol.dll, now it is upon us to do some homework.
Now I will try to describe what I know about plug-ins, and plese try to
correct me, if I am wrong. We just need to orientiate ourselves before
we delwe more deeply into some programming:
-----------
A) NSPlugin, history
I do remember, that there were so kalled NSPlugins. They are dated
back to old Netscape browsers. Such plug-ins worked also with some other
browsers, e.g. Opera. Then Mozilla foundation tried to switch to some
newer architecture, but it was kind of troublesome, and so ppl got back
to NSPlugins. Some two years ago I saw some announcement, there is kind
of enhanced API, and companies supporting such interface were named,
Opera, Adobe, Macromedia, Apple mentioned there IIRC. Now here comes the
questions:
1) Am I right thinking, that actually to produce NS kind of plug-in, you
need to wrap?:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040203041440/http://devedge.netscape.com/library/manuals/2002/plugin/1.0/
2) But then I also found XEmbed:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/plugins/xembed-plugin-extension.html
a) What is that? Is it suggested way of how to wrap NSPlugins?
b) Is that "that" new interface which was announced year or two ago and
to which above mentioned companies announced support?
c) What is meant by "out of process apps?" Does it mean, that I can have
somehow magically my existing app installed, then cross-link it via
XEmbed and get it running inside browser? (I am probably wrong here)
d) Is XEmbed preinstalled with all Mozilla/Firefox products?
3) will NS kind of plug-in work with Opera/Safari/KHTML browsers "as-is"?
-----------
B) XPCOM
1) I can see a lot of activity surrounding XPCOM. If I undestand it
correctly, XPCOM is kind of COM, and it allows you to actually embed
GECKO into your own apps. So XPCOM components are actually "plug-ins",
but plug-ins of how to extend Mozilla/FF (e.g. Adblock), not actually
plug-ins in the NSPlugin kind of sense, right?
2) ... or - can XPCOM be somehow used to get our app into browser too?
And if so - is that the preferred way? But if so - such plug-in will not
be probably usable for other browsers, right?
-----------
C) IE
We all know our "enemy", right? :-) We have some prototype of Rebol
plug-in for IE, coming directly from Rebol Technologies. But it might be
ActiveX or so based. I do remember however, that I once got to link (and
can't find it anymore), which suggested reverse aproach - to create
NSplug-in, which works with Mozz/FF, Opera and other browsers, and then
there was some mention of some library, which allows to run NSplug-ins
even with IE 5.5 and above. Is anything like that possible?
-----------
C) Low activity here ...
I can see very low activity here, which is kind of disappointing for
me. I would like to ask, WHAT is actually the future of browser plug-in
interface? Is it still actively supported? Are there any plans of future
development? And most importantly - is it planned to be included in
future Mozzilla Foundation products, or will it be deprecated. As you
can understand, we would like to know, because if e.g. FF 2.0 will
deprecate it, then we will waste our energy to create something, which
is not long term anyway ....
-------------
D) Any links? If you guys got some interesting links to plug-ins or
whatever related, examples, etc., please post them. Any hint of
where/how we should start is appreciated ....
Thank you very much,
Petr Krenzelok (aka -pekr-),
long-term REBOL language fan :-)
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