[sldev] [VWR] More LLMozLib

Callum Prentice callum at lindenlab.com
Thu Nov 1 14:44:30 PDT 2007


> In doing this i have learn a few things the most interesting is that I
> seem to have all of the xulrunner stuff already installed or available
> for my distro anyway (Debian). And I can in fact build llmozlib
> against my system xulrunner, but with one minor hack because there is
> a dependency of the static lib "libprofdirserviceprovider_s.a" which
> is part of the internal xulrunner code and not normally exposed. But
> this results in a crash when starting the webbroswer, If anyone is
> interested i can provide a back trace but i cannot work out what is
> going on as i have little experience of the mozilla code. I assume
> this is also related to the fact that my installed libxulrunner will
> be based on firefox 2.0 release where as llmozlib is still playing
> with 1.5.

I'm not familiar with building the Linux version of LLMozLib so I can't offer any useful insight I'm 
afraid. It would be *great* if we could do this but as you mention later in your message, we did 
have to make some changes to the Mozilla code to get things working so building against a standard 
install would break things. Drop-down menus is one that springs to mind.

> What is the future of llmozlib? at present it is only used for the
> html login page and web profiles tab. So it seems a bit unnecessary
> carrying 20Mb+ of binary packages just to do that. The two things i
> think I can see with it are the old topic of HTML on a prim and the
> web based login that may or may not be able to use the embedded
> browser. The answers to these questions might answer have i been
> wasting my time completely here? would i be better just sticking to
> MOZLIB=no and not trying to get it to work?

We are intending to use the embedded browser for more than we do now so I would say that getting it 
working is a worthwhile task. For example, the new search feature for example which will hopefully 
be  going out RSN will rely on being able to render Web content.

> What would be a nice solution was if llmozlib could use the proper
> exported mozilla API then it would be possible to use the various
> distros xulrunner libraries where available and keep supply a fixed
> version in the libs package. Care seems to be taken in the mozilla API
> to create a frozen API so exact installed library version is not so

Point taken and understood. Embedding an instance of the GRE in a regular 2d windowed application 
seems quite straightforward. However, I wasn't able to figure out how to do what we need using their 
regular SDK. (I.E. creating a hidden window, rendering to it and grabbing the contents on a regular 
basis in a cross-platform manner). It has been a while since I looked though so I'll have a poke 
about on their site and see if anything has changed since I was last there.

--Callum.


More information about the SLDev mailing list