IcedTea-Web and FireBreath Plugin API

[Andrew Azores]

On 06/19/2014 11:21 AM, Mattias Eliasson wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I also would suggest making a generic java libraries for making Java 
> plugins, for example a JFireBreath API if you chose to use FireBreath 
> as a base. Also it would be useful to design such a library so that 
> plugins can be hosted by Java-based browsers. Javafx WebEngine for 
> example do not support plugins currently, and extending it to support 
> NPAPI would bring to many layers where things can go wrong. Making a 
> clean separation of the NPAPI part of icedtea-web and the Java part 
> would allow for WebEngine and other Java browsers to host Applets 
> without involving a native layer.
>
> Generically I can see that IcedTea-web contains a lot of code that 
> would be better of if its made into separate libraries. For example 
> sandboxing are surely interesting in other projects. I found a 
> sandboxing library but it seams to be dead.
>
> 2014-06-12 16:20, Andrew Azores skrev:
>> On 06/11/2014 08:45 PM, Mattias Eliasson wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> As IcedTea-web have a architectural simplification task I am curious 
>>> if you have looked at the FireBreath plugin API? It seams to provide 
>>> nice high level C++ API for both NPAPI and IE ActiveX. That should 
>>> help reduce IcedTea-Web code a lot since NPAPI are quite chatty and 
>>> hopefully make it easier to squash remaining NPAPI-related bugs.
>>
>> I haven't looked into this myself before, but it looks interesting. 
>> We'll see what others think about the idea and perhaps look into 
>> porting over. Thanks for proposing it.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>

(CC'ing the distro-pkg-dev list)

The sandboxing in IcedTea-Web is mostly just a wrapper around the 
sandboxing provided by the JVM itself. All IcedTea-Web does with it is 
use this "primitive" to create a sandboxing context for applets in 
particular. In all honesty, this context really boils down to a Map and 
a bunch of Java-applet-specific logic on deciding how to populate this map.

As for the FireBreath API stuff... I can't really comment on it. I just 
don't know enough about browser plugin development in particular. What 
you're proposing sounds to me like it would be adding extra APIs that 
IcedTea-Web would expose without a mirror in the proprietary plugin, 
however, which would severely limit the user base I'd think.

Thanks,

-- 
Andrew A