Re: Attempting to Create Obj-C Gecko Framework

[Pedro Ivo Andrade Tavares]

At 13:19 9/4/2001, Brian Powell wrote:
> Most of the crew is currently working on porting Gecko to Mac OS X; 
> however, I am focused upon creating a framework based around Gecko so that 
> any Obj-C application based upon Cocoa or GnuStep can have HTML rendering 
> capabilities.  I believe that this could be an extremely valuable tool to 
> each community whether it is Mac OS X or the amazing GnuStep.

Indeed it would be; good luck to you and your team in this effort! Take 
heart, for it will not be easy.

May I suggest a different path for your effort: study XPCOM (Cross Platform 
Component Object Model). All Gecko objects are defined in an Interface 
Definition Language, which is compiled with a tool called xpidl into source 
C++ files. XPCOM is supposed to be able to be used across several 
languages, altough there is only support for C++ and JavaScript today.

This framework could implement XPCOM in terms of ObjC objects; if 
everything goes alright, Gecko C++ objects (such as nsiWebBrowser and such) 
could be seen as ObjC objects, by running the *.idl files through a 
xpidl-to-objc tool. That would make the job a lot easier.

Also, I suggest you do not try to go overboard in providing gnustep-gui 
buttons, and such, to Gecko. First focus on embedding Gecko as it is today 
into a NSView. Then, if XPCOM has been correctly implemented by the Mozilla 
team, you will be able to write XPCOM ObjC objects to provide a wrapper 
over the gnustep-gui objects.

Pedro Ivo Andrade Tavares