Skip to main content

Soft Announcement: Trapdoor Prototype

Previously I made a little preview of something I'm announcing today, but it is a soft announcement as I've had it on github for some time, but I haven't done anything with the project.

This is just a prototype, an experiment, and it is called Trapdoor. I don't remember why I named it Trapdoor.

Trapdoor has a simple concept, along the lines of Mozilla Prism. I wanted to take things I use to build web applications and test how they could be applied to building desktop applications. This meant two things:

1) I need to wrap up a web application in something that can be run locally.

2) I need some way to extend a web application in ways that normally only desktop applications can provide.

This has been done in the simplest way I could find, at the time, and is available on github.


extensions:



 - calculator.Calculator



js:



 - calculator.js



plugins:



 - trapdoor.contrib.windowmanager

Applications are configured through this simply manifest, where they are given extensions, plugins, and javascript. Honestly, extensions and plugins can probably be merged. They are both defined by a Python class and the object exposes methods to the Javascript, which gets loaded and initialized by the runtime. The current version includes two plugins:

trapdoor.contrib.windowmanager

This is a basic plugin that provides a simple createWindow method, through which the Javascript can create new windows with (in the future) more control than the standard Javascript APIs would otherwise provide. One thing I'll be adding to this is a fullscreen API and other properties to control the window appearance, such as borders and which controls are visible.

trapdoor.contrib.nodes

This is my favorite of the two standard plugins. Each Node is an isolated Javascript runtime, in its own global space. The application is loaded in the first node, but it can create and initialize others, allowing it to run untrusted Javascript safely. If I continue development, I hope to use this to test ways to allow community additions to software without worrying about what they are running. This is similar to how extensions and user scripts work in Firefox and Chrome.

Now, I don't know if more will come of this. I think, if it does, it should probably be evaluated if I should rewrite it based on Chromium and V8, rather than Qt and whatever Javascript engine it is running on. It is also lacking a solid use case, for me, that I can use to drive my desire to improve it. However, I had fun writing it for the thought experiment, and I do hope to do more with it in the near future.

Please, fork it and tell me what you think.
Labels:

Comments

Rich Moore said…
Sounds similar to an app sebas and I wrote called selkie. http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Silk/Selkie for more details.

Qt uses the standard webkit js engine by default. If you build it from source you can use the v8 engine however by passing the option to the build_webkit script.
7:30 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful...
1 comment
Read more

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro...
4 comments
Read more