Re: Standalone XPCOM ?

Richard wrote:
> Richard wrote:
> 
>> Im looking at component models and have a few questions about XPCOM.
>>
>> 1. Is there any mature - generic remote XPCOM system equivelent to DCOM?

no.  only a very early prototype.

>> 2. If I install XPCOM standalone and register my components with it, 
>> can I then install Mozilla and use those components from mozilla?

We are working on it.  See 
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/MRE.html.

>> 3. Can I us XPInstall with standalone XPCOM

No.  XPinstall requires Javascript among other things.  However the list 
of components other than XPCOM that XPInstall requires is quite small. 
You should post a message to the xpinstall newsgroup for specific 
questions regarding to xpinstall.

>> Im guessing that if I create myself a simple binary distro of 
>> standalone XPCOM and PyXPCOM, then make all my components install 
>> themselves with that instance.  When I later install Mozilla I take it 
>> I wont be able to use my components from Mozilla (JS).

That would be correct.  Even with the GRE, your components will most 
likely have to be installed into *each* application using the GRE. 
However, there is hope.  :-)

We could have the mozilla application have a user components directory. 
  When mozilla starts up, it looks for this component directory and uses 
all components found this this directory.  For your case, you could just 
have your components copied into this directory.  Furthermore, I would 
argue that this directory is always registered at startup and never 
persisted similar to what we do with plugin's (well, with plugins we 
keep a list of what files are in the plugin directories, but the point 
is users can just copy stuff into and out of this user's directory and 
don't have to bother with an explict install/registration).


>> Rich
>>
> 
> As an added point, Is there a list of all the bits required in XPCOM 
> (standalone) so that I can extract them all from a binary mozilla install.

Download the SDK and look in the xpcom directory.  It doesn't include 
typelibs, however.  I could have these added to this SDK if this is 
important.

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.2.1/

(it isn't up there right now for whatever reason.  leaf is looking at 
the problem and will have it up there shortly.)

> Also are there any recent .zip/.tar.gz source files anywhere ?  I cant 
> find any more recent than 1999, which is 3 years ago.

Send mail to the builds newsgroup and cc [email protected].  However, I 
do see the source for 1.2.1 here:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.2.1/src


Doug Turner
[email protected]