[conspire] SableVM and (firefox) browser plugins?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Eric De Mund (ead-conspire at ixian.com), writing for Peter
Knaggs's attention:

> Thanks for this tip, back in July. Say, I'm having trouble figuring out
> how to get mozilla firefox to use a sable runtime environment as a
> plugin. Can you point me in the right direction? I'm concluding from a
> web search that this might not even be supported by sable, but your
> note, above, seems to indicate otherwise.

Eric, just because something proclaims itself a JRE doesn't mean it'll 
function as a Mozilla plug-in.  

Mozilla's software interface for such add-ins is the Open JVM
Integration (OJI) specification.  Canonical information on that spec is
here:  http://www.mozilla.org/oji/

That page leans rather annoyingly heavily (considering Mozilla being an
open source project'n'all) towards providing information on _only_ Sun's 
proprietary, binary-only JRE for the OJI interface.  A cynic would point
to the proponderance of Sun employees in the OJI sub-project, as a
candidate explanation -- but, in any event, shame on them:  They should
highlight _all_ OJI projects -- if only to say "Project [foo] OJI has not
yet released code as of Blah Blah 2005 [link]."

Since they're not showing hardly any of the expected leadership, it'll
have to be furnished by the likes of you and me.  So:

I have a "Java" item in my knowledgebase about open-source Java tools on
Linux, linked from http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Devtools/ .  Here are the
OJI entries:

  Japhar:
  The Japhar JRE now works with that interface:
  http://web.archive.org/web/20040217034325/http://www.japhar.org/oji.html
  http://www.hungry.com/old-hungry/products/japhar/

  The Hungry Programmers' group in San Francisco, authors of Japhar, 
  are still disorganised in the wake of the FBI and Secret Service's 
  apparently mistaken early-morning seizure of all of their computing 
  equipment in January 2004, as part of an (apparently) botched 
  investigation of proprietary software bootlegging. It took them a 
  very long time to get their gear and data back (some was never returned), 
  and their losses in the interval included the japhar.org domain, now 
  used for porn hosting.

  Kaffe/OJI shim:
  http://www.kaffe.org/ftp/pub/packages/kaffe-mozilla-oji/
  Allows use of the Kaffe JVM as a Mozilla plug-in.

  Fuji:
  http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fuji/

  Fuji is intended to eventually be an OJI for Mozilla, based on the GNU
  JRE, libgcj. At this date (2005-10-06), it's still in planning stages.
 
I see no indication of an OJI wrapper for SableVM.  If you hear of one, 
please let me know.