{"id":298,"date":"2005-12-20T11:10:04","date_gmt":"2005-12-20T17:10:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=298"},"modified":"2005-12-20T11:10:04","modified_gmt":"2005-12-20T17:10:04","slug":"mozilla-xpcom-and-xpcshell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/298","title":{"rendered":"Mozilla, XPCOM and xpcshell"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most people know about mozilla through Firefox, their IE browser replacement<\/a>. (Some geeks may remember the Netscape source code release<\/a>.) But mozilla is a lot more than just a browser–there’s an entire API set, XPCOM<\/a> and XUL<\/a>, that you can use to build applications. (There are books<\/a> about doing so, but mozilla development seems to run ahead of them.) I’m working on a project that needs some custom browser action, so looking at XPCOM seemed a wise idea.<\/p>\n

XPCOM components can be written in a variety of languages, but most of the articles out there focus on C++<\/a>. While I’ve had doubts about scripting languages and large scale systems<\/a>, some others have had success heading down the javascript path<\/a>. I have no desire to delve into C++ any more than I have to (I like memory management<\/a>), so I’ll probably be writing some javascript components. Unfortunately, because XPCOM allows javascript to talk to C++, I won’t be able to entirely avoid the issue of memory management<\/a>.<\/p>\n

xpcshell<\/code><\/a> is an application bundled with mozilla that allows me to interact with mozilla’s platform in a very flexible manner. It’s more than just another javascript shell<\/a> because it gives me a way to interact with the XPCOM API (examples<\/a>). To install xpcshell<\/code> (on Windows) make sure you download and install the zip file<\/a>, not the Windows Installer. (I tried doing the complete install and the custom install, and couldn’t figure out a way to get the xpcshell<\/code> executable.) <\/p>\n

One cool thing you can do with xpcshell is write command line javascript scripts. Putting this:<\/p>\n

var a = \"foobar\";\nprint(a);\na=a.substr(1,2);\nprint(a);<\/code><\/pre>\n
in a file named test.js<\/code> gives this output:<\/p>\n
$ cat test.js | .\/xpcshell.exe\nfoobar\noo\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
Of course, this code doesn’t do anything with XPCOM–for that, see aforementioned examples<\/a>.  <\/p>\n
I did run into some library issues running the above code on linux–I needed to execute it in the directory where xpcshell was installed.  On windows that problem doesn’t seem to occur.<\/p>\n
A few other interesting links: installing xpcshell for firefox<\/a>, firefox extensions with the mozilla build system<\/a>, a javascript library easing XPCOM development<\/a>, and another XPCOM reference<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Most people know about mozilla through Firefox, their IE browser replacement. (Some geeks may remember the Netscape source code release.) But mozilla is a lot more than just a browser–there’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}