Kevin Ollivier wrote:
On Tuesday,
June 24, 2003, at 01:33 PM, Adam Lock wrote:
I've just checked in a work-in-progress
wxWindows based sample in mozilla/embedding/tests/wxEmbed. It's early
days yet, but wxEmbed is meant to exercise the Gecko embedding APIs in
more diverse ways than the other embedding test apps. So it might
eventually contain various test scenarios (e.g. browser, mail reader,
chat, editor etc.). So far it's just a simple browser and a mail-like
client and is still in development.
Hopefully some interesting reusable classes (and not just for wx) will
also fall out of it. People trying to write protocol handlers or chrome
objects might already like to look at the reusable Gecko* classes.
These too are in development.
Build instructions are in README.txt, but it only builds on Win32 at
the moment. People looking for a proper wxWindows solution should
probably check out wxMozilla, from which this code is *not* derived.
Great, it's good to see some wx samples make it into Mozilla! I'll be
sure to take a look at this! Is there any reason you chose not to use
wxMozilla as the underlying control?
Here are my reasons, none of which have anything to do with wxMozilla
as such:
- wxEmbed is to test the Gecko embedding API. That means hitting
the functionality directly and seeing what sucks and what doesn't.
Abstracting behind a 3rd party class gets in the way of this and for
the same reason I wouldn't use my ActiveX control for testing either.
- Produce reusable code. I want to produce some reusable classes
that work anywhere (not just in wx). For example I have workable (not
perfect) generic classes for chrome and protocol handlers already in
there which can be used in any system. Embedding desperately needs some
helper classes and wxEmbed provides a convenient test bed to develop
them. Maybe they can be retrofitted to some of the other code once
they're mature enough.
- I'm trying to test a broad range of functionality, not just being
an embedded browser, but being an editor, a chat client, a rich text
dialog etc. So far we've been concentrating on just producing browser
apps and I've read of some pretty ugly hacks embedders have had to do
to work around some stuff when they use Gecko as an editor, or some
kind of rich text dialog. The rich text dialog needs some elaboration,
but if you use Gecko to render some kind of fancy message of the day
dialog, you might want untargetted/untargetted links and JS onclick
window.navigates in the message to spawn an external browser and not
reuse the browser in the dialog. Believe me it's a mess to do this
right and we need to develop solutions.
- Licence. This code is being done under the Mozilla sample code
licence which allows allowing anyone to do pretty much what they like
with derived works. The wxWindows licence is a modified LGPL.
To be honest I have only glanced at the wxMozilla code but it appears
to be more of a drop in solution for wxWindows developers and ties the
Mozilla functionality firmly to wx derived classes.
At this
point we lack expertise on the Mozilla side of the equation, and I
think it'd be great if we could move towards a more collaborative
effort on this. Also, I think the cross-platform nature of wxMozilla is
one of the best reasons to use it as an embedding test control - it
helps in finding (and maybe eliminating) subtle behavior differences in
the embedding APIs across platforms. I realize this is just a first
attempt at embedding efforts, but I think it'd be great to move in this
direction in the future.
It's early days yet for wxEmbed but I would be happy to point people
towards wxMozilla (links in the README etc.) if they want an easy way
to embed in wxWindows.
There is room for harmonising the code too, either by ensuring both
wxMozilla and wxEmbed do the same with respect to initialisation, the
implemented interfaces and also in what build flags they use.
The Mozilla
embedding tests could then focus on sample apps (i.e. browser, mail,
editor), and in the process of building those sample apps hopefully the
wxMozilla control will see improvements as well.
Thanks,
Kevin
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