Plugin development

[CUGI]

Are there any docs on plugin development for IBrowse? I haven’t been able to find specifics on the website.

I’d like to know what language / process to use and the API details.

Thanks

[Mike Steed]

> Are there any docs on plugin development for IBrowse? I haven't been
> able to find specifics on the website.
>
> I'd like to know what language / process to use and the API details.

There's no formal documentation that I'm aware of. You have to kind of figure it out based on bits and pieces from various sources.

The Netscape/Gecko Plugin API (NPAPI) documentation is helpful, as the IBrowse plugin API is largely based on it (with some MUI additions). This documentation is getting hard to find these days, as nobody uses it anymore. One place I found where the NPAPI docs are still available is:

https://udn.realityripple.com/docs/Plugins/Guide

When I wrote the FlashPlayer IBrowse plugin more than 15 years ago, I set it up so that the files necessary to create a generic IBrowse plugin were separate from those specific to the FlashPlayer part, with the idea that those files could be used as the basis for other plugins. I put lots of documentation of the API and how IBrowse makes use of it into the source, stuff I had to figure out the hard way. The FlashPlayer source is available on Aminet:

http://aminet.net/package/gfx/show/FlashPlayerSrc

The FlashPlayer plugin source is specific to SAS/C and the 68K/OS3 platform, and would need some work to port to OS4 or GCC. The API information should be applicable to all platforms and compilers, though.

The source for the example IBrowse Flash plugin is more cross-platform (there are OS3 and OS4 versions, and it was designed for GCC), but it does not contain all the API information that the FlashPlayer plugin source does. The example plugin source is not publicly available, but Oliver has in the past made it available to plugin developers.