Liveconnect plugin is not the default in IcedTea6

[Deepak Bhole]

Hi Everyone,

Yes you read that subject right, the moment is finally here! I have just 
completed some final touches to the new plugin, and have made 
it the default for IcedTea 6.

Functionality wise, everything should be more or less complete now. In terms of
stability, the plugin is fairly stable, but I have seen cases where it takes down
the browser, specially on sites with 5-8 applets on the same page.

I wish to dedicate the next week to bug fixing and code cleanup, and to that
end, any testing would be greatly appreciated. Instructions on how to
build/try it out and specified at the end. So if you have a favourite site
that never worked with IcedTea before and you wanted to blame someone till
they got it working, this is your chance :)

I'd also like to mention a special thanks to Thomas Fitzsimmons for the
initial codebase, and his continued helpful insight on the plugin's 
development.

Known issues:
1. Yahoo games does not work. This appears to be a very complex issue, and
   the obsfucation of data passed between server/client makes it very hard
   to figure out the problem.

2. Initial panel size is incorrect if the dimensions as expressed as a %
   (resizing the window fixes it)

3. Sites known not work at the moment:
   http://www.chessgames.com (applet works, but there is a drawing issue)
   http://www.goes.noaa.gov/HURRLOOPS/huirloop.html (hangs)
   Any WebEx app (this works, but a browser restart is needed for first use)

4. If you build IcedTea yourself, make sure you have the right cacerts in
   jre/lib/security/ otherwise bad things happen (nothing bad security wise..
   more like vm crash/exit when trying to load jars from https). The right
   cacerts can be found in the jre/lib/security/ directory of any existing
   IcedTea releases.

5. If something kills the jvm, it cannot respawn until the browser is
   restarted -- this is a bad one and I intend to fix it asap now that other
   priority items are done.

Building + using:
To build it just clone the icedtea6 repo and build:

1. hg clone http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/icedtea6
2. cd icedtea6
3. aclocal; autoconf; automake --add-missing
4. ./configure <with whatever flags you usually add>
5. make

Once this completes, your JDK/JRE should be in
openjdk/control/build/linux-<arch>

Next, create a link (needs to be a link, copying will not work) to
[jre/]lib/i386/IcedTeaPlugin.so either in $MOZ_LIB_DIR/mozilla/plugins
(MOZ_LIB_DIR=/usr/lib by default on i386) or in ~/.mozilla/plugins/

If there is an existing link to another java plugin in either of those
directories, it must be moved out.

Finally, confirm that the new plugin is seen by firefox via about:plugins,
and then load up your favourite site!

By default the plugin does not output much, but if you set the
ICEDTEAPLUGIN_DEBUG environment variable, it will spew lots (and I mean 
LOTS) of debug info. Additionally, it will also redirect stderr/stdout
from java side to /tmp/java.std* files.

Well, that is all I can think of for now. Let me know if there are any 
problems.

Cheers,
Deepak