Alf Eaton wrote:
> Mozilla 2.0 to replace LiveConnect, OJI and XPCOM interfaces for  
> Java: http://boomswaggerboom.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/javaplugin- 
> cleanup-for-mozilla-20/

Oh, that is good news... happy to see a little more relaxed time between
Mozilla and Sun engineers (there used to be a huge fracture between the
two groups back from the Netscape days) and *really* happy to see OJI go
away, it's a ancient piece of code that it's dense as a neutron star and
really hard to understand (I had to debug it while working on
piggybank... not pretty I tell ya)

> Doesn't PiggyBank use an XPCOM interface?

ehm, well, yes but I'm not sure it's the XPCOM interface they are
talking about.

Basically, we do a hack: we intantiate our own javascript XPCOM
component at extension initialization (which has access to the
LiveConnect objects) and pass the LiveConnect object to it, so that we
can make it available via XPCOM (which does *not* have access to it).

We are perfectly aware that this prevents the context that provided the
LiveConnect from being garbage collected and this is far from ideal, but
we couldn't find another way.

I would be splendid if Mozilla 2.0 had an XPCOM component for a JVM that
one could simply initialize and use, that would make it much easier to
write firefox extensions in java (and since modern JVMs can share
memory, it would also reduce memory consumption and increase speed of
startup, at least after the first extension has been loaded).

In times where Flash/Flex is kicking the pants out of Java in terms of
penetration in the rich client ecosystem, it's no surprise that Sun is
pushing harder on the integration with Firefox.

-- 
Stefano Mazzocchi
Digital Libraries Research Group                 Research Scientist
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
E25-131, 77 Massachusetts Ave               skype: stefanomazzocchi
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307, USA         email: stefanom at mit . edu
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