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

[Huzaifa Nazir]

Thankyou Jacob, Alex!
Yes i got the required answer. I just wanted to use it as it is open source. 
Regards,Xaifee 


     On Friday, September 4, 2015 7:47 PM, Jacob Wisor <gitne at gmx.de> 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

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


  
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