Netscape plugin for Windows again

Hi,

I tried to re-implement Netscape browser plugin for windows.

http://metatoys.org/pub/npsqueak/npsqueak.zip (source)
http://metatoys.org/pub/npsqueak/npsqueak.dll (binary)
http://metatoys.org/pub/npsqueak/

There is not new feature against original one though, I just mimicked
it as well as possible. The motivation here was, I wanted to
understand the mechanism under Squeak plugin deeply, and Andreas told
me his original source code was missing in one of his old hard disks ;)

Actually, I also tried activeX version. But I couldn't find any
documentation how to get all param tags in <object> tag (VM needs all
parameters). So it is pending. Anyone know about that?

Cheers,
- Takashi

Takashi Yamamiya wrote:

> There is not new feature against original one though, I just mimicked
> it as well as possible. The motivation here was, I wanted to
> understand the mechanism under Squeak plugin deeply, and Andreas told
> me his original source code was missing in one of his old hard disks ;)

Ouch...
That is bad that you wasted your valuable time because of this
miscommunication.
Andreas found some not quite up to date version that Bernd worked on
recently. Isn't the source in the repository?

Michael

Hi Michael,

Oops, I should ask Andreas at first...

At least, it was a good exercise for me because it was almost my first
Win32 API programming experience. And still I'm very interested in how
activeX plugin was implemented.

Cheers,
- Takashi

Takashi Yamamiya wrote:
> Oops, I should ask Andreas at first...

No problem and thanks for reminding me. I just did a "quick fix" for the
problem that is commit the code that I found to squeakvm.org repository:

http://squeakvm.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/trunk/platforms/win32/vm/Plugin/

This includes the netscape plugin (under NPSqueak) and the ActiveX
control (under SqueakOCX2 - the other one was an older version that
didn't support the url fetching mechanisms etc)

> At least, it was a good exercise for me because it was almost my first
> Win32 API programming experience. And still I'm very interested in how
> activeX plugin was implemented.

In unspeakably ugly terms. ActiveX is nothing for the faint-hearted. The
code requires magical MSVC invokations that I'm not even sure recent
versions will handle correctly. YMMV.

Cheers,
  - Andreas

On Nov 22, 2006, at 9:44 , Andreas Raab wrote:
Great! We also need to get in the fixes in that I added for the Unix  
version (attached) and which impara ported to Windows.
Impara managed to rebuild the OCX recently, with one fix for fetching  
long URLs (was limited to like 200 characters or so). Not sure which  
MSVC version they used, though.

- Bert -

Hi Andreas,

> No problem and thanks for reminding me. I just did a "quick fix" for the
> problem that is commit the code that I found to squeakvm.org repository:
>
> http://squeakvm.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/trunk/platforms/win32/vm/Plugin/
>
> This includes the netscape plugin (under NPSqueak) and the ActiveX
> control (under SqueakOCX2 - the other one was an older version that
> didn't support the url fetching mechanisms etc)

Thank you, I could compile both NPSqueak and SqueakOCX2 with my VC7.
(I used PluginSDK in Mac OS tree).
NPSqueak seems to be very old version though, OCX works fine!

Cheers,
- Takashi

Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> Great! We also need to get in the fixes in that I added for the Unix
> version (attached) and which impara ported to Windows.

So what was the problem? The diff doesn't make much sense to me given
that I don't know much about the unix implementation of that stuff ;-)

> Impara managed to rebuild the OCX recently, with one fix for fetching
> long URLs (was limited to like 200 characters or so).

Oh really? Probably some MAX_PATH confusion.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

On Nov 23, 2006, at 2:33 , Andreas Raab wrote:

> Bert Freudenberg wrote:
>> Great! We also need to get in the fixes in that I added for the  
>> Unix version (attached) and which impara ported to Windows.
>
> So what was the problem? The diff doesn't make much sense to me  
> given that I don't know much about the unix implementation of that  
> stuff ;-)

There were two major problems.

The first does not apply to Windows. It was a bug in the Unix browser  
plugin in the pipe communication with the VM. There was an error  
return code ("resource temporarily not available") on Solaris that I  
never got on Linux, so it was not handled correctly. The symptom was  
that after the Squeakland "project laoding" splash screen the screen  
turned grayish. Took me a while (debugging over the phone) to realize  
this meant the VM simply had crashed. Since I could not reproduce it,  
I was actually flown in to Colorado to debug on-site. Turned out it's  
an EAGAIN error and the cure was to, err, try again. Like, 50,000 times.

The second issue was a cross-platform Mozilla bug, I reported that as  
#359801:

        https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=359801

The symptom (which I had seen a few years earlier, but never  
investigated in depth) was that inexplicably, some bitmap files could  
not be fetched through the browser API. The workaround I implemented  
was that if the regular fetching as file fails, I do the call again,  
but this time using the streaming API, streaming to our own temporary  
file. Nothing on the Windows VM side needs to change for that, the  
temp files are deleted when the plugin exits (on Unix, the VM deletes  
the file immediately after it was opened).

>> Impara managed to rebuild the OCX recently, with one fix for  
>> fetching long URLs (was limited to like 200 characters or so).
>
> Oh really? Probably some MAX_PATH confusion.

Yep, that was it - it caused the CombineUrlSomething error we  
mentioned a few weeks ago ...

- Bert -