Re: gcj to assist in porting java applet to activex control?

[Jeff Sturm <jsturm at one-point dot com>]

On 24 Oct 2001, Adam Megacz wrote:
> > No idea about ActiveX.  For the low-level details of what makes a DLL into
> > an in-process COM component, I liked the book "Inside Distributed COM"
> > from Microsoft Press.
> 
> Nice. AFAIK, an "ActiveX" component is simply a COM DLL which supports
> a certain predefined set of methods (similar in scope to the Netscape
> Plugin API), and happens to be wrapped up in a signed .CAB file.

That reminds me... all COM interfaces extend IUnknown, so in order for a
Java class to be COM-invokable it would need to reserve at least its first
three vtable slots for the AddRef, QueryInterface and Release methods.

I think the gcj frontend could arrange for that on Windows, if needed.

Bundling all of the libgcj runtime into a DLL should work, though the
result would be quite large.  You may be able to trim off some classes.
Use PROCESS_ATTACH to call initializers.  The GC declares DllMain(),
you'll need to hook into that somehow.

Your project sounds very ambitious, but certainly ought to be possible.

Jeff