[Vm-dev] Request: VM support for opening browser

[Camillo Bruni]

On 2012-07-19, at 10:18, Guillermo Polito wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 9:16 AM, Torsten Bergmann <astares at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> In the days of web based applications and Smalltalk web
>> frameworks etc. it is often very usefull to open a browser/URL
>> from within Smalltalk.
>> Currently one has to load FFI and ExternalWebBrowser
>> package.
>> 
>> Why not add support into the VM for that. This would
>> allow us:
>> 
>> - provide a link to the homepage of Squeak and Pharo
>>   in the about box so people can easy access it
>>   right from the image
>> - to give Seaside/Pier/Iliad/Aida served images
>>   a button that opens the browser to the served
>>   sites
>> - server an html based "Help system" from the image
>>   and by choosing "Help" from the menu open it
>> 
>> - ...
>> 
>> On Windows it is just a ShellExecute API call - dont
>> know about the other platforms. Is it possible that
>> VM developers agree on a common protocol and provide
>> it in the next VM release cycle?
>> 
>> Any comments?
>> 
> 
> The thing is... why adding it in the vm and not in the image directly via
> FFI? I mean, you already have support in the vm for that -> FFI plugin (and
> Native boost in NBCog).  And it's abstract enough to do the job...
> 
> I think that in the path to 2.0 there is the idea to have NativeBoost/FFI
> in the core distribution. It's just that there are plenty of things to do
> before :P.

Well once we have OSProcess it's a matter of doing: 
	mac: `open http://foo.bar.com/`
	linux: `gnome-open http://foo.bar.com/` (gnome-open is not installed by default, so we will need some trickery here)
	win: according to torsten the same :)

but indeed this feature is horribly missing!!

I will check with marcus today, most probably we will integrate OSProcess into
2.0 by default.