Subversion, MSDN, Mozilla+MWF

Subversion

Subversion is finally putting the last nail in the CVS coffin it seems. All but GNOME and Mozilla’s CVS are the only two of the most mainstream active projects I know that still stuck using CVS. I can’t figure out why GNOME hasn’t switched yet, but I know its going to be a bit of trouble for Mozilla with the make scripts, lxr, and anonymous mirrors.

Also the ViewCVS project has now been renamed now to ViewVC as of 1.0, and has taken up residence on tigris.org with SVN itself.

Bye Bye MSDN

After having an MSDN subscription on hand for over 10 years, my MSDN sub. is now gone, expired, and dead. I just couldn’t figure out why I needed it anymore. I’m sure I will come to a point where I will need it again, and I might buy a new one in the future. So far I’ve done just fine without it for over 4 1/2 months without it.

Maybe, I might buy another next year… blah… maybe

Mozilla control for MWF

No more compile errors from Mozilla’s headers! Whoohooo. Still lots more work to do. I have to thank the Epiphany guys and the Galeon guys a ton for their help.

Seems I have to directly break some of the documented rules with Mozilla’s embedding API because some of the headers in Mozilla don’t follow them either in some of their unfrozen APIs. From what I gather from everyone though, it’s not that bad calling the unfrozen interfaces in there. Usually requires a few nights of hacking after every major release of Firefox/Mozilla to keep everything working and I don’t mind doing that. Not like we are going to be doing anything that special (hope those aren’t famous last words). I’ve got Firefox 1.5/Seamonkey/XULRunner support right now and I’m nearly there for supporting backword compatablity with Firefox 1.0/Mozilla 1.7.

I was going to go crazy on features since its so easy to tie in anything in there, but I don’t know which part will get rewriten in the next Mozilla based incarnation to be released. I used gtkembedmoz as the main basis for about 50% of my code, so I already support just everything it offers already. I’ve also added support for getting more information from the click and key press events, and I’ve added the ability to disable a few features that you might not want (frames, plugins, images, meta-redirects, etc). I even added support for forcing a repaints, and accessing and consuming a lot of events like before a URL change or on any click or keypress that happens.

However, currently, I’m debating on adding:
* Print/Print Preview support
* Access to the clipboard and the selected text in the window from code
* Access to cookies, history, cache, etc.
* Access to Mozilla’s configuration settings (for reseting the default font’s, text size, etc)
* Access to evaluate Javascript (even get a boolean return code) in the page and get even catch Javascript error callbacks (Galeon does this).
* More networking control (proxy, file handlers, etc).
* DOM integration - will have to be with the XPCOM bridge (unless someone wants to wrap the huge root nsIDOMElement class, the root of all elements, in C for me :-P)

All these features, with the exception of the DOM access, is very easy to add, however the more I add, the more any change in Mozilla’s codebase in the future could make it easier to break.

I think I’m going to play it by ear when wrapping the WebBrowser API in MWF to see where I get too.

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6 Responses to “Subversion, MSDN, Mozilla+MWF”

  1. amadrias Says:

    Hi, do you have any rough estimate on your expected delivery date for this WebControl?

    Thanks

    Amadrias

  2. Alex Concha Says:

    PostgreSQL project is still using CVS too.

  3. shw Says:

    now i don’t know what to do. i was always thinking that when i will have choice - use SWF or other GUI i will choose gtk#. Mostly because of gecko# working on it [i don’t like IE]. now i’m not so sure what will i choose.

    and my opinion what to implement:
    - access to clipboard ans selected text […]
    - access to js
    - dom integration

    i can live without others - i’m not planning to make next webbrowser with settings and things like that - i need control that will display html and be able to make some operations on it.

  4. zbowling Says:

    No timeline as of yet. I don’t really even have a planned roadmap at this point. I really just know what has to be done and I’m doing it :-P When I get an alpha going, I should have an idea, but at this point I can’t say.

    I think the clipboard integration and the javascript access will be possible. DOM integration is going to be massive hurdle.

  5. jfcarbel Says:

    Wow, Delphi developer here that was looking for Gecko embedding in Delphi. Found an ActiveX control and then stumbled across your page.

    I would love to try and use this control in Delphi .NET or C#.

    Was actually looking at the mCatalog program which uses GeckoSharp to render a screen that looks like the Delicious Library app on the Mac.

    I hope your control will support as many features as the GeckoSharp since I am building an application like mCatalog.

    I’d would vote for print/preview, access to selected text, proxy config settings.

    Does your API support the search of text where it will highlight and scroll to the text found? This is a feature that could be quite useful in apps using it as an embeded control for document management and display.

    I believe this is a much needed control/API since I have not seen any easy way to embed the mozilla WebControl in .NET based apps. If someone else knows of current options to explore, please let us know.

  6. knocte Says:

    I can’t figure out why GNOME hasn’t switched yet, but I know its going to be a bit of trouble for Mozilla with the make scripts, lxr, and anonymous mirrors.

    This seems to be a problem, but not the main reason. It’s an INVALID bug but nothing happens if you put there a vote.

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