[openvrml-develop] OpenVRML on Mac OS X

[Braden M. <br...@en...>]

I have access to a machine running Mac OS X (10.4), and I'm beginning to 
put some effort into making OpenVRML behave better on this platform. 
This initial effort is going into making things work with the MacPorts 
toolchain.

As of this writing the trunk builds with the MacPorts tools, sans 
openvrml-xembed, openvrml-player, and the Mozilla plug-in. I have added 
a configure option --with-libjs that facilitates linking against the 
libjs binary that is typical of the stand-alone SpiderMonkey 
distribution (rather than libmozjs that is included with 
Mozilla/Firefox). This will likely come in handy in other build 
scenarios as well.

Since I don't anticipate much interest in an openvrml-player that 
requires X11 on Mac OS X, I doubt I'll be spending any energy on making 
that work. But if someone happens to be interested in this, it shouldn't 
be that hard.

Instead, I would like to get openvrml-player and the Mozilla plug-in 
working with Carbon and/or Cocoa. I'd like that, but unfortunately I 
don't think it's going to be easy. My investigation thus far indicates 
that the Mac GUI frameworks have no support for out-of-process GUI 
components. That means that the pattern by which openvrml-player and the 
Mozilla plug-in share the same back-end (openvrml-xembed) simply won't 
work on the Mac. So as things currently stand, a port will not be as 
simple as mapping functionality from one API to another.

I don't yet know enough about Carbon/Cocoa to know what the right way to 
resolve this is. One possibility is that functionality in 
openvrml-xembed and openvrml-player might be factored out into libraries 
that can be used by different processes on X11 platforms and different 
threads on Mac OS X.

Braden