Generalities in installing plugins

[deadseasquirrels]

I installed my first plugin yesterday (Java Plugin) on Mozilla 1.21.

So what I did was create a symbolic link to the java plugin "module" (I'm totally using terms inapporpirately), to the .../mozilla/plugins directory.

So I was wondering if that was how you install all plugins, basically creating a symbolic link in the /mozilla/plugins directory to some plugin application.

Second, can somebody explain to me a little bit of what is going on behind the GUI? I mean does mozilla go to it's plugin directory and just looks for a certain symbolic link and that symbolic link takes the browser to an executable file that does the plugin work? What is going on behind the scenes? Is that how all plugins basically work in other OS's but we just don't see it going on? I'd like to learn this a bit if anybody knows the answer.

[Dolda2000]

Plugin semantics are very different from program to program. Loading shared libraries is, however, a very common way of doing the work. Mozilla basically examines every .so file in those directories (and all subdirectories thereof) and checks if it can be loaded, and if it can, if it contains a function by a specific name. If it does, mozilla calls that function, which returns a struct, which holds the addresses of the functions in the library that mozilla's core can call on to do the plugin stuff. XMMS works pretty much the same way.
So basically, you don't have to symlink the file there. You can just as well hardlink it or copy it or whatever you like. A file is a file is a file.
Note, however, that the file you linked to is not an executable, but a shared library, as stated above.

Another common way of creating plugin support for a program is to use a script language, such as guile.

[yowwww]

see my guide for how to install java and to make the symbolic link to mozilla.

mine looks something like this:

ln -s /usr/java/j2re1.4.1_01/plugin/i386/ns610/libjavaplugin_oji.so  /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins

see my guide for more details though.

link in my sig below as usual