I’ve been through the Windows and Mac video tutorials on the FireBreath (FB) website, through all the documentation and even seen the ActiveX example that a person has provided.
It’s been an entire week, but I still can’t understand how to create a new project in FB. The only thing explained on the website is how to get the FB sln compiled, where the PluginTest example is already coded. Even for the ActiveX example, only the code is given. It isn’t explained as to how they created the project.
So how do I create a new project in FB? Should I just take the existing FB sln file and create a new empty project in it? How do I know what classes I should add to the project? How do I edit cmakeLists.txt to recognize my project? How does running prep2010.cmd make my newly added project compile?
If I need to create a wrapper for my ActiveX, how do I go about creating that project in Windows?
If you have been through the windows video tutorials and didn’t see how to create a new project then you were obviously not paying attention. The first video tutorial on both windows and mac tells you how to use fbgen to create a new project.
To get text instructions, you can find them fairly easily:
Go to http://firebreath.org and click on “Getting Started“. Scroll down to “Creating a new plugin project” and click on the link.
Either method will walk you through essentially the following steps:
1) Install cmake, visual studio, and python (if you don’t have any of them)
2) Get FireBreath (the video tutorials suggest using git; I made the tutorials, so you can guess my suggested method).
3) Run fbgen.py with python and follow the steps.
Congratulations! You have now created a new plugin project!
To build it, you’ll need to run the prep script appropriate for your platform and then open the build/FireBreath.(sln | xcodeproj) file in (visual studio | xcode). Note that this differs a bit depending on whether you’re on Windows or Mac.
The prep script (such as prep2010.cmd) does not make your project compile; instead it uses cmake to generate the project files for that project for your computer which can then be used to build the project, as explained in the pages linked above. You should never modify anything in the build directory directly, instead you should modify the CMakeLists.txt file in your project directory or if you have platform-specific changes you need to make you can modify Win/projectDef.cmake and Mac/projectDef.cmake.
FireBreath.org is a wiki, so feel free to help us make these things easier to find; as you can see from the links all of the information is there. To me it seems easy to find, so obviously I’m not a good one to try to fix the problem (since I can’t see it).
As for making an ActiveX wrapper, there is an example of doing this but it’s not really something that is just “easy to do”. FireBreath does not in any way attempt to make this a simple thing to do — that’s not the purpose of FireBreath. FireBreath is simply a framework for creating browser plugins; if you want your plugin to act as an activex wrapper you’ll have to implement all of the activex for containing your control yourself.
Hopefully that’s enough information to get you started. If you are confused, please go read those links. If you’re still confused, read them again — all of this information is there. If you’re still confused, come ask in the FireBreath chat room on IRC and I’ll try to help you figure it out.