Near as I can tell, Netscape hasn't released the plug-in SDK for Unix
systems yet. Does anyone have any information indicating otherwise?
Once it's available, we'll take a serious look at it. A cursory
overview of the specs leads me to believe that the conversion wouldn't
be very difficult, since we've already isolated all the I/O and
drawing calls (during the OS/2 port). The one big issue is
compression: MetaCard needs to be able to read stacks in some
compressed format, both off of disk and over the network. Using the
gzip format would be nice, but the GPL terms make this impractical,
especially in the Windows/Mac world where you can't just spawn a
subprocess to run the gunzip binary. Anyone have any suggestions on
compression formats, or on getting around the GPL (e.g., can the
library version of the GPL be applied to gzip?)
The *real* 2.0 engines (as opposed to the gamma release ;-) also
support a "safe" mode where file and process access is disabled,
allowing use of MetaCard as a Helper Application without jeopardizing
system security. You just register MetaCard in the mime.types and
.mailcap files, click on a HTML link with a .mc extension in your
browser, and up pops a MetaCard window with the stack in it.
We're working up a neat demo showing how much superior MetaCard is to
Java for doing multimedia over the WWW. Not only does a MetaCard
stack take a fraction of the coding to do the same things as a Java
applet, but it requires less than 1/4 the RAM and only 1/15 (!) the
CPU time (we've reproduced the Java "steaming coffee cup" demo on the
Java Home page and measurements are taken from that).
We're still waiting to hear back on a few "maybe" problems before we
release 2.0, but it should be in the next couple of days.
Scott
> _/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
> _/ Boyd Sweeney Scientist, Nichols Research Corporation _/
> _/ sweeneyb@puzzler.nichols.com (205) 883-1170x1775 _/
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-- *********************************************************************** * Scott Raney (raney@metacard.com) Tcl and ksh: syntactic gymnastics * * http://www.metacard.com MetaCard: it does what you think * ***********************************************************************