Squeaking the web....and security issues...and BeOS stuff

johnm at wdi.disney.com johnm at wdi.disney.com
Fri Oct 30 21:38:27 UTC 1998


"Steve Harris" <sharris at thinktankinc.com> wrote:
> I am planning on building a version that using the netscape
> plug-in api.  this should make it much easier to port between platforms,

I did this about two years ago, and you should find most of
the hooks for it in the Mac source file sqMacWindow.c. The basic idea
was to run the Squeak VM for some number of bytecodes on each "idle"
event provided by the Netscape browser. (Pluggins run as user event
handlers that are expected to return control to the browser fairly
quickly--say, within half a second.)

One problem with this approach was that the mechanism to count
the bytecodes slowed down the bytecode dispatch considerably--by a
factor of two, as I recall! A better approach might be to use a timer
interrupt to tell the VM when to return control to the browser.

Do you have any thoughts on how to handle this problem?

	-- John

P.S. I believe that the Netscape plug-in API is supported by IE as
well as Netscape, so I agree that using this API is a much more
portable approach to making Squeak a plug-in than ActiveX. But
it could be that having Squeak run under ActiveX has other applications.
(I don't use Windows much, so I'm not sure what a Squeak ActiveX
control might be used for. Could you embed a Squeak application
in a Word document? Control Squeak from another application?)





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