From: ser@... (Sean Russell) Date: 2004-03-20T02:09:33+09:00 Subject: Re: Mozilla gets support for other client-side languages in the future, how about Ruby? ptkwt@aracnet.com (Phil Tomson) wrote in message news:... > Looking on Ruby-talk archives I see that someone is willing to offer a > reward for doing the C-work needed to allow Mozilla to be scripted from > Ruby (I'm not sure why that article isn't showing up on my newsfeed, btw). > No details on how much money being offered... That someone was me, and I was talking about a fund, specifically. What I'm willing to offer alone probably isn't worth the effort for the developer, but if several people were also willing to "pledge support", or if Dave sets up his non-profit fund, then it'd probably be able to buy several hours worth of a developer's time. A good C developer, with some knowledge of the Mozilla code base, could probably hack out the basics of it within a few hours. That'd be enough to get started, I think. > If there were some way to script Mozilla with Ruby & XUL I could use it > right now for a project at work. Ditto. > How much work is involved? Anyone have any idea? Again, I don't know, not knowing the details of what would be involved. A really basic interface, as I said, probably wouldn't take more than a few hours. What gets tricky (or takes up time) is stuff like: 1) Packaging and documentation. 2) Sandboxing (not important for local apps, but critical if distributed apps are a target) 3) The DOM interface I suspect that much of the IPC work has been already done in the XPCOM project; there may be an opportunity for code reuse there. The DOM interface is the major mechanism for communicating between code and the HTML rendering engine. Sandboxing is a complex issue; security concerns are what are going to be the real ass-biter in the long run. However, as I've said, one partial goal for this would be simply to enable another GUI toolkit for Ruby, one that is already widespread. This in itself would make the project worthwhile. The long-term goal, of being able to use Mozilla as a remote application platform, is the holy grail. --- SER