There was a request for D-XPCOM (i.e., creating and invoking methods on XPCOM objects in a remote process) on n.p.m.xpcom, and it got me thinking. We have a working IPC mechanism, and we have a typelib system, so probably D-XPCOM would be pretty easy to create, right?
A little over-the-weekend hacking, and I ended up with something that works reasonably well. It has some issues (e.g., no support for arrays yet), but for the most part it works.
Now, to make this useful, the "listener" component that allows remote processes to connect to Mozilla needs to be activated at start time. This means that we'd need to pay some overhead cost whether this feature is used or not. That's of course a bit troubling since that sort of thing usually spells b l o a t. Perhaps something that leverages Xremote/DDE to trigger something in Mozilla that bootstraps the IPC listener would make the most sense. Dunno.
Posted by darin at May 5, 2004 8:53 PMThat sounds sweet. If you could fix the overhead problem, this would be killer!
Posted by: jed at May 5, 2004 11:01 PM