29-10-2010, 10:43 AM
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Gecko Embedding Basics seminar report
entertainment,
and personal connectedness, the ability to access and view data stored in HTML
format is becoming more and more important for a wide variety of otherwise highly
divergent software applications. Whether it’s a matter of a simple HTML page viewer
or of a full-fledged web browser, the ability to parse and render HTML-based documents
is an increasingly significant function in many, many situations. For the application
developer, the problem becomes how to implement this crucial functionality in
a way that minimizes development time yet results in an agile and robust product.
Embedding Gecko, the rendering engine at the heart of the Netscape and Mozilla
browsers, is an outstanding solution to this problem.
Why Gecko
Gecko is the smart embedding choice. It is quick, robust, and highly standards compliant.
In its Mozilla and Netscape incarnations, it has been widely distributed and
very well reviewed.
It is Open Source. Unlike other embedding choices, all of Gecko’s source code is
freely available and fully customizable. You can tinker and tweak as much as you
need. Yet, depending on the license chosen, it is quite possible to use Gecko as a component
in what is otherwise a fully proprietary commercial product.
And because Gecko is associated with the Mozilla project, there are many resources
available to assist the embedding effort. The Mozilla web site, mozilla.org, has an
embedding project area at mozillaprojects/embedding/. There is a newsgroup,
netscape.public.mozilla.embedding, focussed on exchanging information among
embedders, as well as a number of other related newsgroups. A complete cross-reference
for the codebase is available at lxr.mozillaseamonkey/. And filing, following
the progress of, and helping to fix any bugs is made simple through the Bugzilla
bug database, bugzilla.mozilla.
Gecko is also architected from the ground up to be cross-platform. Directly from
mozilla.org, it runs on Wintel, Mac OS 9.0 and OS X, and Linux, and there are thirdparty
ports to a number of other platforms.
Finally, licensing Gecko is royalty-free, even if the final application is an otherwise
proprietary commercial product. Very generally, any modifications of the original