Thank you for the reply and the redirect to this group. It sounds like a question of less work that is more complicated / risky (context: most programmers at my place of work are skilled C/C++/assembly embedded programmers & we spend our time dealing with registers/interrupts/timing/DSP rather than high-level concepts) on the XPCOM side vs. more work that is more straightforward (grungework but do-able) on the JSAPI + jsshell side.
Again, my application needs no interface into Mozilla's GUI/DOM/HTML/etc, just the raw Javascript engine as a shell. I would agree that XPCOM wins if I could surmount the overhead of getting it to work at all & understand the subtleties of reference-counting and the restrictions when one limits functional interfaces to XPIDL (for example, if I want to use something like sprintf/printf from xpcshell, how would I deal with variable-length arguments?). I have not formed a conclusion yet, though. I would RTFM in both cases but there does not seem to be a FM. :o) Tasks I could use advice on... 1) How to obtain a standalone copy of xpcshell, by doing one of the following: 1a) Prebuilt -- I have downloaded the win32 .zip version of Mozilla 1.7.5 but cannot seem to identify the specific set of files needed. (Why isn't this built into the standard install of Mozilla or Firefox?) 1b) Build from source -- need to obtain it, then build... not insurmountable but I would rather avoid. 2) Find a good source of documentation on XPCOM. 3) Understand whether any of my functional requirements are tricky/impossible to implement in XPCOM, rearchitect those as necessary. (Less of an issue with JSAPI as I know what the language is that I'm interfacing with, vs. XPCOM when it could theoretically be anything.) 4) When I do end up building my custom objects, what files are the output files and where do they need to be installed in order to work with xpcshell? 5) [other unforeseen problems that will probably occur to beginners] _______________________________________________ Mozilla-xpcom mailing list [email protected] http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-xpcom
