Zac Bowling’s Blog

I’ve been going non stop of this Mozilla embedding code. I’m getting so far.

I’ve laid out some milestones for myself when I started. Here is where I’m at:

• Milestone 1
  • Fork gtkembedmoz into a new component. Remove references and dependencies to GTK+ bring in parts from other embedding implementations. Get it to compile. (Exact way the Java Web client was created so I though it was the best route to go). Design and write basic invoking wrapper to be used by p/invoke later.
  • Difficulty: Easy, just lots of work
  • Status: Completed on 05/07
• Milestone 1.5
  • Separate code base to the project build outside of Mozilla’s code tree and without having to build it in-line during a normal build of Mozilla
  • Notes: Built project skeleton up, wrote macros for autoconf to find Mozilla sources and libs (pkg-config doesn’t exactly work for what I’m doing).
  • Difficulty: Hard
  • Status: Completed on 05/12
• Milestone 2
  • Drop all references to all internal and private classes in Mozilla. Switch to embedded string classes. Bind ONLY to Mozilla’s xpcomglue and embed_base_s libs.
  • Notes: Now compiles against latest Mozilla SDK or SDK directory in your dist folder of your Mozilla and using the standard development headers. No need to build Mozilla to get it to work. Begin work on C# wrapper and wrote a very minimal implementation to start testing.
  • Difficulty: Hard
  • Status: Completed on 05/18
• Milestone 2.5
  • Drop emed_base_s lib dependency by handling Mozilla XPCOM startup and shutdown ourselves
  • Difficulty: Fairly easy
  • Status: 100%
• Milestone 3
  • Drop dependency on xpcomglue lib and bind directly to xpcom. This will make it possible to build the binding without having to download a binary SDK or build Mozilla to extract the SDK from the build to link against.
    This step still remains to be seen if its completely feasible. The best why to find out is to try and do it.
  • Notes: this may require dropping nsSupportWeakReference which I’m not sure what the effect will be yet.
  • Difficulty: Hard
  • Status: 100%

You can see some of the specifics on the Mono wiki.