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636

answers:

4

Hi, 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

Thanks in advance

+3  A: 

Note: the following are for making EXTENSIONS, not plugins. Sorry.

Both have helped me in the past.

JasonV
He asks for plugins (like Apple QuickTime), not extensions.
Ionuț G. Stan
Ah, didn't catch that. Edited.
JasonV
+1 cool thanks for that.
Yar
+3  A: 

Search for NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface). Here are some results:

Ionuț G. Stan
+2  A: 

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).

Charles
A: 

If you need something that works cross-browser (firefox and ie), you could look at firebreath: http://firebreath.googlecode.com

It's nearing a 1.0 release, but is currently windows only.

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/

Taxilian