XPCOM Port to Java Upcoming

Hi,

  Kevin A. Burton (of Apache Jetspeed and NewsMonster
fame) just dropped the bombshell in his PearFeer blog
that Brad Neuberg with assistance from the master
himself is working on a port of XPCOM to Java.

  Kevin writes:
 
  News will move forward over on java.mozdev.org.
Patches should be available sometime this week. This
is a pretty aggressive project... a full port of XPCOM
to Java. This will allow developers to write
components in JavaScript, C++, or Java and seamlessly
integrate components used in other languages. 

NewsMonster critically needs this component. Right now
we are having to cheat to support RPC by using
LiveConnect but in the long term this is not a
sustainable development approach. 

  Full story @
http://www.peerfear.org/rss/permalink/2003/07/14/LiveConnectRequirementsForApplicationsDevelopedWithTheXULTookit/
and http://java.mozdev.org
   

  Also in an older blog entry titled "The Minefield
that is Mozilla, XUL, and Java" Kevin shares some tips
on how to spice up XUL with Java.

   Kevin writes:

The goal is simple. Build a Mozilla application so
that a Java backend can be used to interact with a
Mozilla/XUL front-end. It make sense. Combine the
power of Java's server libraries (Jakarta) with the
interactivity and user interface capability of
Mozilla. 

It also seems like it would be easy. After all Mozilla
and Java have a long history together and the Java
Applet and LiveConnect architecture have been around
forever. 

If you though any of these things (like I once did)
you would be wrong. Dead wrong. 

Getting Java to work with XUL is nearly impossible. I
have spent the last five days working on this problem.
They aren't short days either. They are long 18 hour
hackathon days. I now have a mechanism setup for
NewsMonster to interact with Java and vice-versa. 

The trick is to do the following (god I wish I had
this documentation five days ago): 

* Don't use LiveConnect callbacks from your applet
into XUL. It won't work. Java -> JavaScript
communication from chrome:// URLs doesn't work. If you
did manage to get it work you would notice that it is
dog slow. 

* Don't use the applet tag. Instead you will have to
dynamically create your applet code via
document.createElementNS then set your attributes.
This is needed because you will need to update the
codebase attribute to point to
MOZILLA_HOME/components. 

* Don't load your .jars from chrome URLs. Instead you
have to use file URLs. This is because Java doesn't
support a chrome URL scheme. 

* Package your .jars in your XPI and copy them to the
components dir on install. 

  Full story @
http://www.peerfear.org/rss/permalink/2003/03/30/1049022836-The_Minefield_that_is_Mozilla_XUL_and_Java

      
  - Gerald

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