Eclipse SWT-XPCOM Renderer

I made the most amazing (re)discovery last night. SWT makes the Mozilla DOM easily available via Java XPCOM. It solves all of my rendering analysis problems in one swoop; I really wish I had looked more into this a year ago, it would have saved me about a month of hassle messing with WebRenderer. Just to be fair to WebRenderer who gave me a free academic license for their product, they do make some of the basic stuff easier for non-hackers. But their API has some pretty serious deficiencies.

At first I was turned off because it appeared fairly heavyweight in dependencies and confusion. However, the swt library is one jar, the XPCOM libraries are one jar, and then you need a GRE installed (through XULRunner). Then use both the snippets from the SWT site and the XPCOM interface APIs and you can do almost everything you can from within native Mozilla code through Java fairly easily.

This is sort of bad timing for me since I'm currently in the middle of lockdown mode where I'm trying not to go off on coding binges and spend more time writing my dissertation. However, I may have to take a small detour, just for the sake of the library.

Just to go over several advantages of SWT-XPCOM over WebRenderer (sorry guys):
1) It gives me access to file size information through the http cache Mozilla has
2) It shuts down, which WebRenderer doesn't do...they hold open a native library listener until the system exits
3) It's easier to upgrade the mozilla version, you just get a new GRE
4) It doesn't require me to pass interesting page calls through serialized Javascript, I can directly access the native objects through JNI interfaces
5) Their JNI interfaces appear to be better written, some calls in WebRenderer take forever

Disadvantages:
1) Requires a GRE installed
2) Requires some understanding of how Mozilla code works (runtime interface casting)