On Thursday, July 25, 2013 4:53:20 PM UTC-7,
gpee...@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi there,
>
>
>
> I've spent already two days trying to understand the documentation and force to work mozilla build system with no luck.
>
> It seems that mozilla documentation is ridiculously out-dated and sparsed
*** Indeed. I wanted to build a simple XPCOM module to control a local scanner. After a week of part time fussing around trying to just get a "hello world", I gave up and just decided to code my thing in Perl/Tk. Foo.
The best and most up to date "documentation" I found on XPCOM was in the current Mozilla source. There's a directory called xpcom, and inside that a directory called "sample", with a reasonably well commented idl file and C++ code. I was able to compile the whole firefox source, including that sample without too much pain, using the "mach bootstrap" and "mach build" commands. This was on a five year old Ubuntu 12.04 Linux box. Took a couple hours.
The IDL output wound up in an "obj-(bunch of stuff)" directory at the top of
the mozilla tree. Inside that directory was a "xpcom/sample" directory with the IDL output in there somwhere and also the compiled XPCOM object ( I think ) and a test program - which crashed and burned when I ran it. There was also a
Makefile in this output area, and I was able to make changes to the sample back in the source and recompile just that by saying "make" in the obj directory.
The sample at
www.iosart.com/firefox/xpcom/ is totally out of date and unusable - at least by me.
I might go back to this when I get some time. I don't think the difficulties are insurmountable. I could do many marvelous things with access
to native machine resources from Firefox.