794479 - Add support for loading java code in addons

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Attachment: WIP

Turns out it's not that hard to load arbitrary java code from an addon into Fennec.

1. Apply the attached WIP to fennec
2. Grab the sample addon from https://github.com/staktrace/fennec-addon-javaddon and install it into fennec
3. ???
4. Profit!

If we want to expose this we should probably have some well-defined API interfaces that the addon java code can be compiled against, and that are provided to the addon java code at runtime.

Comment 1

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Adding sec-review-needed since this will allow running arbitrary java code in the fennec process.

Comment 2

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Holy crap this is a small patch. Exciting!

Comment 3

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Comment on attachment 664984 [details] [diff] [review]
WIP

Brad suggested landing this patch and putting together a proper API for addons in follow-up bugs. So requesting review here.

Comment 4

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Comment on attachment 664984 [details] [diff] [review]
WIP

I am eager to see what projects this feature can open up in Firefox.

I wouldn't mind seeing some examples and a brief doc on what can _and_can't be done using this idea. For example, I assume we can run standalone Java code, but can the code interact with the Firefox UI?

Comment 5

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

Also, we might want to move to a JS ctypes -> JNI approach instead of the Dex:Load JSON message.

Comment 6

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

(In reply to Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) from comment #4)
> I wouldn't mind seeing some examples and a brief doc on what can _and_can't
> be done using this idea. For example, I assume we can run standalone Java
> code, but can the code interact with the Firefox UI?

It should be able to, since it's in the same process.

Comment 7

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Landed on inbound: https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/3cc4987101b8

Filed bug 799631 for adding proper APIs.

Comment 8

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/3cc4987101b8

Comment 9

[Mark Goodwin [:mgoodwin]]

Dealt with (along with Java APIs in bug 805436) in https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Reviews/MobileJavaAddOns