Embedding Minimo

tgethings · Post by **tgethings** » December 14th, 2005, 9:18 am

Hi all,

Im looking to embed a browser/html renderer in a Pocket PC/WinCE application and i was wondering if anyone knows if this is possible with MiniMo? Has anyone done anything like this before or is there a SDK provided to embed MiniMo as a control in a larger app?

I was looking into how to do this with Pocket IE but thats turning out to be torture so im looking to MiniMo as an alternative. Ive only started looking at MiniMo so im sorry if ive just missed something really obvious.

Thanks in advance,
--Tom

guyshefner · Post by **guyshefner** » December 15th, 2005, 2:52 pm

I'm just starting to look into a similar problem (embedding Mozilla/Minimo in another app -- not PPC, in my case though). I'll share my initial understanding, but would love to hear an expert confirm or correct me.

From what I understand, you wouldn't embed Minimo (at least not in its default form), which is itself an app which embeds other core Mozilla components (e.g. the rendering engine, networking, etc). As far as I can tell, these core components are built from the same source as they are for Firefox -- although with a different build configuration. Your app would embed these same components, much like Minimo does. Perhaps your app could be a derivative from Minimo depending on how different it is from a browser-like app. In my case, my app is a browser, just integrated with a different app framework, so I'm hoping to use Minimo with very little modification.

As for an embedding SDK, checkout <a href=http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/>http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/</a>. I played around with TestGtkEmbed from this project. But I read on <a href=http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/dougt/>DougT's blog</a> that Minimo is taking the place of TestGtkEmbed as the primary example of how to embed Mozilla.

Anyway, I'm just learning myself, so take with a grain of salt.

tgethings · Post by **tgethings** » December 16th, 2005, 2:42 am

Thanks for the reply! As you said im not actually looking to embed MiniMo but rather its rendering engine, i want to be able to provide my own caching and networking facilities. Ive just started working with MiniMo, im going to try a build today and see how i get on. I would also like to get an experts view on what im trying to do, to see if theres an easy way around it....there never is though!

mattiash · Post by **mattiash** » December 18th, 2005, 3:16 am

I think a lot of applications use and will use the WebBrowser control in NETCF V2 (<a href="http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229657.aspx">http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229657.aspx</a>). For such applications it would very interesting to have a "similar" control that uses Minimo instead of IE/PIE behind the scenes. Using a WebBrowser-like API means they wouldn't have to rewrite their application to do this.

If someone starts to embed Minimo as some sort of control, I hope you'll consider this before implementing. Just my thoughts...