Re: Proposal for inclusion of mozilla-bonobo in 2.5

[Christopher Blizzard <blizzard mozilla org>]

Michael Meeks wrote:

On Tue, 2003-10-21 at 19:44, Havoc Pennington wrote:
  

cc'ing Chris Blizzard and quoting your full mail. Chris is planning to
work on a new plugin system for Gecko using XEMBED, etc. instead of Xt
    

	Of course - if this means that GtkPlug/Socket get a lot of hard-core
attention, this is excellent news; ultimately that work is necessary
independent of whatever's underneath.

	Ultimately though - I think this is a fairly good application of
bonobo, which has the advantage of a deployed and stable API, and
potentially richer functionality than a bare plug/socket. Also saves
writing yet another activation / component system where components need
registering etc.

	I'd personally like to see OO.o embedded in Mozilla - esp. after the
great work that Martin K did on the bonobo component for that - which
works in nautilus but not in mozilla-bonobo yet [ due to obscure
plug/socket issues ].

Unfortunately, we've got dueling stable APIs.[1]  The Mozilla plugin API is basically the same api that has been used since the early Netscape days.[2]  I was pretty careful in adding this support that it not break old plugins, and still allowed for newer plugins that wanted to use xembed to be able to fail gracefully.  You could, at least in theory, write a plugin that worked with both Xt and Xembed and therefore work in a wide variety of older system configurations, but that wasn't what I was optimizing for.  I just wanted something that works and was stable.

That being said, I don't think that bonobo is entirely appropriate because we've got something that works and we've already got a large number of existing users to support with our interfaces.  Supporting a generic bonobo plugin shouldn't be hard, though.  It would just be a shim between the existing interfaces and what bonobo provides.  Of course, you would have to write that anyway if you were adding bonobo support, so there's no win in adding it to mozilla directly.  Except you would have to look at our grotty plugin code.  And that would make you sad.  Trust me.

--Chris

1.  Our stable APIs are older than yours.  Neeneer neener.
2.  For a while, the current api was actually depreciated in favor of a shiny new api but that turned out to be a disaster so we depreciated the new api and re-appreciated the old apis.  Those responsible have been sacked.

-- 
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Christopher Blizzard
http://www.mozilla.org
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