PyGecko Home Page

  Goals

    The PyGecko project was born out of the need to have a stable
    web & touch-screen kiosk. Currently this is attained by
    embedding IE6 in a Delphi, which is restarted-on-crash by
    another Delphi app, which also reboots when windows system
    resources get too low.

    Anyway, the goals are as follows:

    1. Make a binary distro of "PyXPCom", http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/Komodo/PyXPCOM/

    2. Make an easy to use wrapper for the Mozilla Gecko rendering
    engine

    3. Make a simplified "embedded browser" python class

    4. Make a "wxPython":http://wxpython.org/ compatible verison

    5. Make a "Boa Constructor":http://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/
    component for it

    6. Make wrappers for other "xpToolkit", http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/
    widgets.

  Possible Follow-on Projects

    Mozilla gecko actually presents it's own GUI tool kit. It is
    called "xpToolkit", http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/. This is what
    "Active State's Komodo", http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo/index.plex
    is based on.

    If this GUI turns out to be quite good, I think it would be neat to
    make a python wrapper for all it's widgets and perhaps a port of
    "Boa Constructor", http://boa-constructor.sourceforge.net/ too.

  Get Involved

    "Active State", http://www.activestate.com have kindly made one of
    the libraries used to build
    "Komodo", http://www.activestate.com/Products/komodo/index.plex
    available to the community. This library is called 
    "PyXPCom", http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/Komodo/PyXPCOM/
    and enables us to "talk to" Mozilla with our Python programs.

    Unfortunately, at the moment, as far as I know, one has to compile
    Mozilla and compile PyXPCom from source. I found it easy to compile
    Mozilla, but haven't managed to succesfully compile PyXPCom
    yet. That's why the first goal of the project is to make a binary
    distribution of PyXPCom available.

    Here's a list of URLs that I've found useful:

      - "IBM Developer Works Article: Getting started with PyXPCOM", http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/components/library/co-pyxp1.html

      - "Getting started with PyXPCOM, Part 2", http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/components/library/co-pyxp2.html

      - "XPCOM at Mozilla.org", http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/

      - "PyXPCOM at Active State", http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/Komodo/index/PyXPCOM/

      - "Gecko Project at Mozilla", http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/

      - "Mozilla Embedding APIs", http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/PublicAPIs.html

      - "developerWorks xpcom intro (Only if you don't know COM)", http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/components/library/co-xpcom.html

      - "My Chrome Oven: Generating XUL with Python (Slightly Interesting)", http://www.mozilla.org/docs/xul/xulnotes/xulnote_oven.html

    To get started, just read the two PyXPCom articles at the top of the
    above list, the first one tells you how to, "download Mozilla src", http://www.mozilla.org/source.html
    and "compile it", http://www.mozilla.org/build/. But read carefully,
    there's some enviroment variables, that you have to set. And then
    how to compile PyXPCom, which I'm about to have another crack at.

    If you want to participate, get a "sourceforge account", http://sourceforge.net/account/register.php
    and "email me":mailto:miracle@paradise.net.nz, and I'll add you into
    the "sourceforge project":http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/pygecko.

    Short Term Plans

      The Project's short term plans are:

        - To build PyXPCom

        - To get more helpers

        - Start a mailing list
    
    By the way

      This page was generated using "Structured Text (stx)", http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Articles/STX
      "Zope", http://www.zope.org. This is a really marvellous invention
      and allows you to write web pages really quickly.
      "Here":index_source.stx is the source of this page