[Accessibility-ia2] ia2poke as a firefox extension

Michael Stewart mstewar at us.ibm.com
Fri Feb 9 06:58:50 PST 2007


Steve,

Does pyxpcom.xpi let you create XPCOM components in Python and not
just use XPCOM components from Python?

I am not sure I understand the question, but my undestanding is that
through comtypes, we can create COM objects.
http://svn.python.org/projects/ctypes/trunk/comtypes/docs/comtypes.client.html
 (if you figure out a way to view this other than saving it locally, please
lmk)

We should find out the status as
that must include some XPCOM support if not full pyXPCOM with
component creation in Python.

I agree!  How nice that would be, maybe Aaron knows...

If this is not available we would not
require the *user* to build as you suggest but would distribute a
custom XULRunner

how would one come by this custom version?  that is, shall I make it?  If
so, do you what exactly that would entail?

pyXPCOM comes from Active State as part of Komodo so does that not use
XULRunner? If not how do they encapsulate XUL and what about the other
projects like songbird and democracy? Can we leverage that?

great points all, I will try to investigate this further.

Thanks for your response Steve




Hi Michael, boy I'm thinking I'm glad you picked this up before I did
(for the rest of you, Aaron spotted common ground between ias2poke and
Jambu and I've had extremely limited time till now).

I have a couple of points to flesh out the issue.

Does pyxpcom.xpi let you create XPCOM components in Python and not
just use XPCOM components from Python? You'll want that or otherwise
create c/c++ components to interact with IA2. That's less homogeneous
but not a complete show stopper and could be done equally in XULRunner
or Firefox (I assume).

There are/were plans to add Python as a native language alongside
Javascript at least in XULRunner. We should find out the status as
that must include some XPCOM support if not full pyXPCOM with
component creation in Python. If this is not available we would not
require the *user* to build as you suggest but would distribute a
custom XULRunner (and hope for the main line support to appear RSN).

If XULRunner becomes a standard deployment mechanism it could get
bundled with Mozilla products including Firefox and so becomes less
restrictive than a dependency on Firefox.

pyXPCOM comes from Active State as part of Komodo so does that not use
XULRunner? If not how do they encapsulate XUL and what about the other
projects like songbird and democracy? Can we leverage that?

Steve

On 2/8/07, Michael Stewart <mstewar at us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
>
> Just to ensure we are all on the "know who Michael is page," I just
wanted
> to remind everyone that I am Michael Stewart, and I am working on a poke
> tool for IA2. The plan is to write this in Python, and I have been
exploring
> some technologies recently to handle the display. A neat suggestion
(thanks
> Aaron) was to try to use xulrunner so that not only would the source of
the
> functionality be more readable and maintainable (and modular and...) by
> being written in Python, but then the UI source would also be more
> accessible by being written in xul. The major problem with this approach
has
> been that it is nearly impossible to build PyXPCOM against xulrunner,
which
> would be necessary in order for Python to communicate with xulrunner.
>
>  So there have been many hurdles along this path that are not the focus
of
> this email, I am on the pyxpcom activestate list and  Alex Badea posted
> http://vamposdecampos.googlepages.com/pyxpcom
>  to the list, and I installed Minefield (FFox 3) and tried out his
> extension, which works well. I am not sure of the practicality or even
the
> possibility (that's why I'm writing you all!), but what if the IA2 Poke
> tool, (by the working name ia2poke) were a firefox extension? I mean,
this
> would require that developers using the tool install firefox of course,
> but...would that actually be something installed just for this tool? The
> other possibiliity we were investigating (xulrunner) would have required
the
> installation of xulrunner anyway, so I am not sure that this is much
worse.
> Also, depending on licenses and IP stuff, distributing an xpi (firefox
> extension) that depends only on firefox, as opposed to distributing some
> package that is dependent on the user having built PyXPCOM against
xulrunner
> (read above about the impossibility of this) seems optimal.
>
>  Michael
> _______________________________________________
> Accessibility-ia2 mailing list
> Accessibility-ia2 at lists.freestandards.org
> http://lists.freestandards.org/mailman/listinfo/accessibility-ia2
>
>


--
Steve Lee
www.fullmeasure.co.uk
www.oatsoft.org
www.schoolforge.org.uk
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