Dysfunctional Programming

Nine days ago, I made an off-hand remark in #content that I might be able to get the geolocation service working in Fennectrolysis by the end of the day if my plans worked out. I also remember referring to the process as “not a big deal.” Since that moment, I have put in a significant amount of work (at least several hours every day), and learned:

• My estimating skills are severely underdeveloped
• How to make use of the cycle collector
• How weak references work
• Best practices for XPCOM reference counting
• There’s a confusing thing called nsIClassInfo which I should learn more about, but I know enough to force it to do my bidding for now
• How non-modal prompts work
• The meaning of obscure GCC linker errors like “undefined reference to vtable”
• How to implement an XPCOM object in Javascript
• Implementing XPCOM objects in Javascript frequently results in much more pleasant code than C++

Having said all that, yesterday I got the Fennec geolocation permission prompt to appear when triggered by a content page, and the proper callback was called when I allowed or canceled the request, so I’m confident that I can have a patch up for review by the end of the holiday weekend. Of course, given my track record, that means it might be up by the end of the week.

Posted on April 4th, 2010 by Josh Matthews
Filed under: code, mozilla