My goal is to get Limewire(JAVA) and Songbird(XULRunner) to run together.
I was thinking the best way is to run the XUL application(songbird) inside a JAVA swing panel. Is there another way?
Would it be better or possible to have the GUI entirely in XUL, and then access my JAVA objects somehow?
How would I go about doing this?
Thanks
Take a look at JRex, as it might let you peek into a couple of ideas.
Other than that, I'd also research about Rhinohide as well.
Take a look at DJ Native Swing, a native Swing implementation using SWT and Xulrunner.
I am currently researching XUL for a new product and I came across JavaXPCOM which allows Java code to interact with XPCOM objects. I'm still wrapping my head around the Mozilla stack, but from what I understand all XULRunner applications use XPCOM. Therefore, it seems like you should be able to embed Songbird with this approach.
The official XUL implementation by Mozilla and is heavily dependent on Gecko. Gecko is not written in Java nor embedded in AWT/Swing/SWT (at least without using JNI).
So, the short answer is: no. You must either use JNI or use heavy, complex and incomplete third party libaries.
However, JavaXPCOM seems to allow embedding Gecko: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaXPCOM But in that case you'll depend on Gecko... and I don't know if that's enough to run Songbird.
I would examine Limewire's source code. If there's a clean separation between UI and the rest of the application, I would try finding a solution to instantiate and invoke Limewire's non-UI code from within a Songbird extension.
I would take a look at eclipse swt's embedding of xulrunner: http://www.eclipse.org/swt/faq.php#whatisbrowser
