pyxpcom

[Trent Mick]

hg wrote:
> Trent Mick wrote:
>>> My need is as follows: I have developed an activex component to access a
>>> smart card on the client side / do some web site logon.
>>>
>>> Are xpcom / pyxpcom advanced/stable enough for such an implementation
>>> under Linux / Windows ?
>> You mean to provide the equivalent functionality for Firefox that your
>> activex component does for IE? Yes, xpcom and pyxpcom are quite stable,
>> however putting together a Firefox extension that gets PyXPCOM itself up
>> and running in a client's Firefox install will be quite challenging.
>>
>> Trent
>>
> Exactly ... are you saying I need to distribute Firefox compiled
> differently in order to achieve that ?

No. But you'll have to get comfortable building your own Firefox and then 
building the PyXPCOM extension and then packaging the built PyXPCOM bits that 
a normal Firefox install does not have already into a Firefox extension. This 
would also mean packaging up parts of a Python build and possible needing to 
have a custom Python build to (1) get shared library loading to work correct 
and (2) ensure there isn't crosstalk between the python that PyXPCOM uses and 
possibly other Python installations on the target machine.

> This is less a python issue clearly if that is the case: would I have
> the same issues to resolve if I were to write the module in C++ ?

A little, yes: I believe you'd need a Firefox build in a development tree to 
build a vanilla C++ XPCOM component. However, I am not sure of that.

Mostly, no: You wouldn't need to worry about all the PyXPCOM/Python 
build/install issues.


Trent

-- 
Trent Mick
trentm at activestate.com