Jetpack OOP

Experimental use of Out-Of-Process capabilities in firefox 4 to provide multi-process capabilities in addon-sdk.

It use same platform capabilities than Fennec: <xul:browser remote="true" />

That is already working in Firefox4 by creating a remote browser component in the shared process plugin-container that contains all tabs content, plugins and now our new "remote browsers" too.

Then it use q-comm library to interact asynchronously between these two processes.

Example of use

--- test.js : a module that is going to be loaded in the remote process exports.test = function () { return "test"; }

--- Code snippet that instanciate a remote process and load the previous test module into it: IPC.newProcess(function (process) {

  // Load test module in it
  let testModule = process.require("test");

  // Call test function on this module
  let result = Q.post(testModule, "test");

  // Check that the result of this function is valid
  Q.when(result, function (v) {
    test.assertEqual(v, "test");
  
    test.done();
  });

});

Interesting files

• Low level IPC test demonstrate how to use firefox platform capabilities to instanciate a remote process: test-low-level-ipc.js