On 5/28/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It's .NET embedding IE, so it would be possible to
use the Mozilla
ActiveX wrapper. Main trouble is that it uses lots of bits of .NET
that aren't in Mono yet.
No, no, no -- I don't know why everyone has this in their heads that the
Mozilla ActiveX wrapper can simply be interchanged with IE. The Mozilla
component has a horribly, horribly immature DOM interface that allows you to
do pretty much nothing. Additionally, it's bug-ridden as all hell, crashing
frequently and without provocation. Believe me, *everyone* would rather use
Mozilla in their apps, but it's simply not do-able. This is the primary
set-back to porting windows-based MediaWiki clients to *nix; it's not that
developers think "unix is scary," it's that much of the Linux world is
quite
rocky and unstable at this point, and much of the functionality offered in
the way of development in Windows is completely unavailable in *nix.
Instead of screaming at the Windows developers, it's likely much more
productive to scream at the developers of Mono and Wine, although if you
really want things to get done, you shouldn't scream but offer a hand ;).
Additionally, Wine is actually a shockingly stable interface, and anyone
with enough patience can get just about any Windows application to run under
it. I've gotten three of my Windows tools to run under a Wine (all three of
which were dependent upon IE, I might add), and I'm currently working on a
way to deploy my most recent app for seamless install on Wine--we'll see how
that goes. I would personally find development in the way of Windows
emulators to be much more prone to success than attempts to port current
software. I would also bet there are likely many ways to hack AWB to run
under wine, it's just a question of if anyone has the patience to do so.
--
Daniel Cannon (AmiDaniel)
http://amidaniel.com
cannon.danielc(a)gmail.com