I am in the process of writing a Firefox/Netscape plugin (not extension) to run on windows, and I was wondering if you could suggest any sites for guidance and tutorials?
I have been looking through the Mozilla documentation, specifically the gecko sdk documentations for a reference, but it's not the easiest to follow.
Just wondering if there are any good sites out there for helping with this? Or will I need to rely on the Mozilla docs.
Note: the following are for making EXTENSIONS, not plugins. Sorry.
Both have helped me in the past.
Search for NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface). Here are some results:
I highly recommend using Nixysa, it's new http://code.google.com/p/nixysa/. It abstracts away the details of NPAPI. Plus, it has a working sample. The website describes it best:
Nixysa is a framework written in Python to automatically generate glue code for NPAPI plugins (plugins for browsers such as Google Chrome or Firefox), letting you easily expose C++ classes to Javascript from a simple IDL representation. Nixysa was originally conceived for the needs of O3D, but is flexible enough to support a wide range of use cases.
Check out the code following the instructions here and try the sample in examples/complex.
You can write a program that can register and invoke a Javascript callback too.
One caveat is that there is no documentation (thus far).
If you need something that works cross-browser (firefox and ie) and/or cross-platform (windows, linux, mac), you could look at firebreath: http://www.firebreath.org
It is quite stable and has a lot of great features.
For general "getting started" information, I have a few blog posts on the subject (linked to from some of the above sources as well)
http://colonelpanic.net/2009/03/building-a-firefox-plugin-part-one/
