Unplugged!

The Bare-Bones shebang about Netscape plug-ins

Three things are difficult in life...climbing a forward-leaning fence, kissing a backward-leaning woman and designing stuff as unequivocally obtuse as Netscape plug-ins (like you most surely suspect). I overheard in one of the "water-cooler" gossips that a plug-in is not as knee-knockingly scary a creature as it is reckoned to be. The only hitch is that when you get a new product these days, you also get a bundled guarantee that by the time you reach greener pastures, you cannot climb the fence at all. Th at is, if you rely on their unwieldy sample code to sprinkle the may-dew of techno-enlightenment. As regards the woman part of the difficulties, dear friend, you could spend the rest of your life trying to figure that out. (And translated, that means : you are good for none of those three difficult things in life)

But wait, if you refuse to cotton to such skulduggery in geekdom, just read on. We will tell you how even a stooge can devise the spooky-sounding plug-in, provided he is not so preposterous a stooge afterall; and how you can continue to be a vertebrate by not rolling off the fence. And once you get the drift of the brand spanking new concept of plug-ins, you can go the saturday prom with a shinier flash of teeth -- which will help you overcome the gender snag.

Why should I bother about the darned plug-ins anyway ?

For the developers, that's a tingling food for thought. And to think that its not so unaffordable afterall, is another great news. You simply have to let your browser know how to do it. When we say 'browser', we mean the popular Netscape . The letting the browser know means we willbe using using Microsoft Visual C++ to befriend the browser. This program that introduces Netscape to the various file extensions and how to handle these files is called a plug-in .

Just about how smart should you be

• You know MFC programming (at least so much that you don't feel you're fudging facts when you claim you do). We have used Visual C++ 2.1 for the various programs.
• You have a copy of Netscape Navigator, the browser without which all this exercise is pointless (unless you have a penchant for measly wisecracks ofcourse :) ) For the record, we have worked on the version 2.0b4
• You have the Netscape plug-in SDK, that can be downloaded as freeware from the Internet (for those who came in late or did not come at all, the software can be downloaded from the Netscape page .

Things mother never told me

Trying to escape from a bear trap is a snap as compared to resisting the temptation to look into a neighbour's window. We'd rather blab for ourselves that we have combed through the code doled out by our techno-counterparts, pecked out the concepts essential to get a grip on the basics of the technology (which is not so tough afterall) and placed it out here. That gave us a firsthand experience and since we cracked the code, we thought we might as well do some good to the world and our friends out there i n Cyberspace by sharing it with them. Once you have read this, you'll have to be really hungry to go to any other site.

Where the rubber meets the road...

"Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing. "

When you set on a new concept, you are anxious to avoid commiting a faux pas . It takes more than good intentions and a few moments of your time to keep the typically awkward frustrations at bay. When you get a sample code these days, the folks out there love to forget they are writing code for a mortal individual, not for a skunky, blinking silicon chip. We are rather disinclined to have snazzily hefty code because it faces the same problem as a crowded room -- when something begins to stink , you cannot really say who has the gas problem. We staunchly abide by the rule "short is sweet". Infact, you are not expected to drill this entire caboodle into your crew-cut head all in one sitting. You'll do just fine by using this page as a learning tool and a future reference ( like coming back anytime your grey cells go for a toss, looking this page up for any niblet of information and saying "Oh, so that's what they are talking about.")

Meanwhile, we would like to confine ourselves to our usual trilogy of well-defined scruples..

• The variables that we use will be of one letter, for instance i, j, g etc.
• The functions will be of two letters, e.g., aa() , bb() etc.
• The class names will be three letters, e.g., zzz etc.

Well, with that chip of wisdom up our sleeves, let us unplug the vista of plug-ins and learn the lay of the Land (and prepare to join the highfalutin programming jing-bang soon).

• Hitting the Road Getting a grip on what the hub-bub is all about
• Under the Hood

Keeping the ball rolling

We hope all this slogging on our part has been of some use to you (and we appreciate the chutzpa you have displayed by reaching this stage). If you get a grasp of this spooky concept, you can safely say you have a headway in the state-of-the-art digiteratti (to coin a phrase) while the big, bad world out there does not even know what a goddamn plug-in is (that it does not want or need to know is besides the point). If you have any creative (um..uncreative will do too) ideas regarding this modest tutorial t hat we have put up, please hustle your ideas back to us.

Or if you are feeling a trifle too hardheaded and want to know more about some other latest technologies, get back to Vijay Mukhi's Technology Cornucopia.

Too curious about something ?

This tutorial is a joint effort of

Mr. Vijay Mukhi

Ms. Sonal Kotecha

Mr. Shashank Tripathi