Liveconnect may be removed

[tob...@googlemail.com]

I'd like to send data from JS to Java and back. I have to use a Java
applet, because JS is too slow for my purposes. So I want to use
LiveConnect for the communication, but I read at http://developer.mozilla.org/En/LiveConnect
that

"LiveConnect may be removed from Mozilla 2.0 according to this post by
Josh."

What should I do now?

[Brett Zamir]

Ah, the eternal question without any answers from anyone... I'm tempted
to answer '42'...

From what I've gathered...

The good news is that NPAPI:
http://developer.mozilla.org/index.php?title=En/NPAPI (a more generic
plugin infrastructure, not limited to Java, and apparently
cross-platform as well) is supposed to work with Java in the future at
least--doesn't seem to work at all now unless perhaps you use the early
access update 10 for Java 6 (?)--see below.

The bad news is that there's no clear indication about whether that will
be ready for Firefox 3.1, etc. (which I understand may have dropped
LiveConnect already?:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=397080 ). One issue seems
to be dealing with the Mac. This potential or real discontinuity is
pretty frustrating.

There are details about the future of LiveConnect (which seems will have
its name resurrected by Sun) at:
https://jdk6.dev.java.net/plugin2/ and a demo demonstrating the
interface:
https://jdk6.dev.java.net/nonav/plugin2/SimpleLiveConnectTests.html (I
wonder when people will get the memo that <applet/> is deprecated--they
say it will work with <object/> though. Here's another example at the
MDC site (using the non-standard <embed/>):
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/Gecko_Plugin_API_Reference/Scripting_plugins#How_to_call_plugin_native_methods
).

One person reports that Java 6 update 10 helps with some bugs:
http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000519.html and the same update 10
is mentioned at the site explaining the death of LiveConnect:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_2/Kill_LiveConnect . Not sure that the
early access update 10 will be helpful if you want your users to get it
easily by default, but at least you might be able to experiment with it.
(Let us all know if you do.)

The bug that tracks the removal of LiveConnect in Mozilla is at
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=442399 .

In the meantime, if you do decide to use LiveConnect for Firefox 3.0.*,
I recommend being aware of these pretty basic bugs
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391642 (Try-catch)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=434658 (Arrays -- has
an easy workaround)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=417706 (new
java.lang.String)

Other outstanding bugs (which are just for information rather than
fixing now, since no core developers seem to even be watching or at
least responding to the preexisting LiveConnect bugs) can be found at:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=liveconnect

best,
Brett

> _______________________________________________
> dev-tech-java mailing list
> dev-te...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-java
>
>
>