DiamondX XEmbed Example Plugin

Introduction

DiamondX is a simple NPAPI plugin built to run on Unix platforms and exercise the XEmbed browser extension. If your browser can run the DiamondX browser plugin then it ought to be able to run the upgraded, XEmbed-supporting future version of Adobe Flash Player for Unix (on particular platforms and CPU architectures).

Requirements

• a working build environment (gcc, autotools)
• X11 headers and libraries
• GTK 2.0 headers and libraries
• Netscape Portable Runtime (nspr)

Download

diamondx-0.1.tar.bz2 (260 KB)

Installation

Unpack:

  tar jxvf diamondx-0.1.tar.bz2
  cd diamondx-0.1

Configure and build:

  ./configure
  make

At this point, the customary step is to perform 'make install'. However, that will not do anything useful for this plugin. Execute:

  make install-plugin

This will install the plugin into ~/.mozilla/plugins which is one of the standard destinations for browser plugins in a Unix environment.

Testing

In Mozilla/Firefox browsers, check the "about:plugins" page. The DiamondX plugin should be registered.

The same applies for other NPAPI-compatible Unix browsers, using whatever facilities that register the existence of plugins. If the plugin fails to register, if may be necessary to ask the browser to re-register the plugins. If this still doesn't work, run the 'ld' command against the plugin binary to make sure there are no missing symbols:

  $ ld ~/.mozilla/plugins/libdiamondx.so
  ld: warning: cannot find entry symbol _start; not setting start address

The warning about the missing _start symbol is normal. Any other warnings may indicate a problem.

To test the actual plugin functionality, load the file "test/index.htm" from the main source distribution directory. This should show a page with a 400x300 DiamondX plugin against a non-white background:

• Moving the mouse over the plugin should result in mouse motion events.
• Moving the mouse into and out of the plugin should result in enter and leave events, respectively.
• Clicking the left mouse button should trigger a lot of stuff:
  • A button 1 press event.
  • A notice about which quadrant of the plugin was clicked.
  • A button 1 release event.
• If the mouse is clicked in the first or second quadrants, the plugin should present either a modal info dialog or a modal file selection dialog, respectively. Test that the hosting browser honors the modality of these dialogs.
• A right mouse click inside the browser should launch a context menu.
• If present, the mouse scroll wheel should report scrolling events.
• Focus: focus should not follow the mouse. This is a major selling point of XEmbed. Fine-grained tests:
  • Clicking inside the plugin when the plugin does not have focus should send a "focus in" event.
  • Clicking outside the plugin when the plugin has focus should send a "focus out" event.
  • While the plugin has focus, pressing and releasing keys on the keyboard should send key press/release events.
  • When the plugin has focus, move the mouse outside of the plugin. The plugin should still receive key events.
  • When the plugin does not have focus, move the mouse inside the plugin. The plugin should not receive key events.

Future Development

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