[webkit-dev] Towards a More Convenient IWebUIDelegate

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Dec 2, 2009, at 10:47 PM, Steve Falkenburg wrote:

>
> On Dec 2, 2009, at 9:53 PM, Brent Fulgham wrote:
>
>> To add insult to injury, all of these interface classes also  
>> require each concrete implementation to implement a stub  
>> QueryInterface, AddRef, and RemoveRef method.
>
> Yes, this is one of the downsides of COM. Some COM developers use  
> ATL (or similar) to avoid boilerplate implementations of AddRef/ 
> Release/QueryInterface.
>
>> For my own purposes, I created a concrete class "WebUIDelegate"  
>> that stubs all methods as E_NOTIMPL and provides the boilerplate  
>> QueryInterface, AddRef, etc..  I subclass from *this* class as my  
>> delegate, which allows me to simply write one method that does the  
>> menu customization.
>
> Sounds similar to what we do.
>
>> Couldn't the Windows version of WebKit either stub the  
>> IWebUIDelegate with the requisite E_NOTIMPL stubs, or perhaps ship  
>> with a set of pre-generated stub classes like the one I just  
>> created, to avoid this kind of drudgery?
>
> COM interfaces are pure virtual, so there is no implementation of  
> IWebUIDelegate in WebKit.
> We could provide a concrete CLSID_WebUIDelegate that was  
> instantiatable via (our version of) CoCreateInstance but you  
> wouldn't be able to subclass it. We don't export any of the WebKit  
> COM API directly through DLL exports.
>
> All of these conventions were critically important when the COM API  
> was remotable via DCOM in order for Drosera (Web Inspector in its  
> previous iteration) to work out-of-process. Some of this isn't as  
> important now, but we'd like to maintain compatibility for existing  
> clients.

I think we could provide a DefaultWebUIDelegate which has a default  
implementation of all the IWebUIDelegate methods and which clients can  
subclass. That would not be available via DCOM, but it's not a  
critical loss of functionality since you can still write your own  
IWebUIDelegate from scratch in that case. Likewise for the other  
delegates.

egards,
Maciej