MS compatible interface to xulrunner?

[Thomas Kaltenbrunner]

Hello Jacek,

first of all, thank you for this detailed explanation.


Am 19.07.2010 17:11, schrieb Jacek Caban:
>  Hi Thomas,
>
> On 7/19/10 3:29 PM, Thomas Kaltenbrunner wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am interested to port the wine interface to the xulrunner back to 
>> mswindows to access the xulrunner via a IE compatible interface. So 
>> it would be easy to replace an embedded IE with the gecko-engine.
>> After some code browsing I thing it will be some of the "DLLs", 
>> especially mshtml and shdocvw.
>> I just wanted to hear from you an opinion about that project.
>> What will be the main changes to the wine code - besides renaming of 
>> the dlls?
>> Where do you see problems?
>> Did somebody else worked on that or implemented it already?
>
> The main problem is that what we need (and we need it because apps 
> need it) doesn't belong to XULRunner. Wine's IE libs implementation 
> needs an architecture compatible with MS implementation. We do ugly 
> things with Gecko to make it work. For example we don't use necko for 
> loading documents. We use urlmon.dll instead. An app may register its 
> own protocol handlers, overwrite an existing handler or simply depend 
> on us using wininet for http. We also allow using our jscript instead 
> of Gecko JS. This is needed to allow scripts written for IE work as 
> well as interaction between script and app. There are more smaller 
> things we have to do because applications need them. I think none of 
> them makes sense to be in XULRunner itself.
>
> There was a project (no longer maintained AFAIK) in Mozilla called 
> Mozilla ActiveX control. It was kind of a replacement for WebBrowser 
> control - a high level part of IE embedding API. It can work for some 
> simple applications, esp if they are prepared to use it. I think it's 
> a good compromise between having anything like that in XULRunner and 
> not having things that don't belong there.
Yes. I tried it, but it did not work correctly - even with a more or 
less simple application. So am looking for a better implementation.
I think wine must have a very good implementation.

>
> In my opinion, if your goal is to make embedding Gecko easier, it 
> would be better to work on Gecko embedding API itself. Currently, 
> although it's easy to do simple HTML embedding, if you want to do 
> anything more complicated, you have to go through semi-internal, not 
> backward compatible interfaces. Some things like interacting with 
> scripts from the pages are not possible at all (although recently 
> introduced ctypes might have changed it). It's far from being nice for 
> developers IMO. Mozilla is getting rid of backward compatibility for 
> mozilla2 (Firefox 4). It will surely hurt apps using XULRunner for 
> embedding, but it may be also good time to rethink the API to be more 
> friendly.

I had already a look at the XULRunner api - but I did not find an easy 
starting point.

Thomas Kaltenbrunner

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