Can icedtea's web browser plugin be ported to windows ?

[Jiri Vanek]

On 09/04/2015 04:47 PM, Jacob Wisor wrote:
> On 09/04/2015 at 14:23 Alex Kashchenko wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 09/04/2015 12:35 PM, Huzaifa Nazir wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>     - I have used windows unofficial openjdk port from here
>>> https://github.com/alexkasko/openjdk-unofficial-builds
>>>     - Tried porting icedtea's web plugin under cygwin from here
>>> http://icedtea.wildebeest.org/download/source/icedtea-web-1.5.tar.gz
>>> but it failed with following Errors:
>>>     -  initially it was failing to find X11.EmbeddedFrame class in OpenJDK
>>> ["configure: error: sun.awt.X11.XEmbeddedFrame not found"]
>>>     - upon skipping the class check, it started requiring some methods related
>>> to applets within OpenJDK to be public which in the used OpenJDK were private
>
> Currently, Icedtea-Web does not include any Windows specific code (except for some very minor user's profile folder handling). So you will not get far with Cygwin or MinGW, at least with what is in the repo. In other words, you will run into a dead end.
> However, yes, the Java part of IcedTea-Web can be compiled and run on Windows too but that's about it. The NetX configuration panel should sort of work but it is still lacking full and proper integration with the user profile folders and some system folders. Plus, desktop integration (creating icons for applications) works completely different on Windows than the Free Desktop Specification, which IcedTea-Web supports now. So this does not work either.
>
>>> How can icedtea's web plugin component be ported to windows? is it even possible?
>
> Yes, it can. However, some significant amount of new code is required for the native ActiveX and/or NPAPI browser plug-in to work. I would say that I have done a quarter of this work by now.
>
>> I know there were discussions about Windows support in IcedTea Web browser
>> plugin [1] on distro-pkg-dev list (CC'ing it), but I don't know whether there
>> were any results.
>
> Yeah, unfortunately, my work on this has stalled since my old hard drive broke. But, I shall resume working on it if you are interested. This raises the question; why are you interested in IcedTea-Web for Windows? Why don't or can't you go with the Oracle implementation?
>
>> Also WebStart module from IcedTea Web should work fine on all platforms running
>> as following (from the command line, outside of the browser):
>>
>>      java -Xbootclasspath/a:netx.jar net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.Boot some.jnlp


This actually should work. The only issue should rise from the not existing and not creatable paths. But I did no tested too. Especially there is no serious testing of itw's javaws on windows ever.
One aditional thing for plugin is - why npapi for windows, why not try ppapi? (I know old flame, but still nobody seriously tried)

>
> I have not tested it myself but I am rather reluctant to think it is going to work flawlessly or at all. And, even if it does, there is still code missing that would/should make IcedTea-Web integrate with Windows nicely. Things like temp, cache, and config folders, user & system certificate stores, JRE enumeration and detection would require additional code paths for Windows. Also, all of these are handled slightly different on Windows, and all of them are mainly handled in Java. So, as you can see, even the Java part would require additional code for Windows, not much but some.
>
> I hope this answers your question.
>
> Regards,
> Jacob