Re: NPAPI replacement for those of us who still need system API access

On Saturday, October 10, 2015 at 11:07:30 AM UTC+11, Chris Peterson wrote:
> On 10/9/15 1:38 PM, Richard Bateman wrote:
> * child_process API
> 
> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Low-Level_APIs/system_child_process

Thanks for linking to this.

I develop control systems for machines, where a browser is the UI (dynamic HTML is a good language for this), while the machine logic and machine I/O is written in Java (Java PLC). I currently connect the two through Applets. There's an invisible Applet for the main control program, and I once had a separate graphing Applet, which I've had to convert to JavaScript, because unlike IE, Applets print blank in Firefox on Linux. This was hard to do because the LiveConnect interface between Java Applets and JavaScript is extremely inefficient, forcing me to send the large amounts of graph data as encoded strings rather than arrays.

Now the Java plugin is going away, I'll have to run the Java control program in a separate process, and find a way to communicate with JavaScript. What's really needed is a Firefox extension and Java class that when paired emulates the LiveConnect API (DOM manipulation and bi-directional remote procedure calls), but implements it through inter-process messaging. This will save many people developing their own custom replacements.