Introduction to WebKit Plug-in Programming Topics

Who Should Read This Document?

This document is designed for a number of different audiences:

If you are a Cocoa and WebKit developer, you should read about the plug-in architecture used by WebKit and learn how compiled plug-ins operate within WebKit-based applications, including Safari.

If you are a developer who is concerned with cross-platform compatibility for your software, but who also wants to deploy special content via a web browser, you should read about the Netscape-based plug-in architecture and learn how it is supported in a variety of browsers.

If you are a web content developer, you should read about both plug-in architectures and learn how to integrate their features into custom plug-ins to support your content.

Note: As of Safari 5.1, the legacy WebKit plug-in architecture is no longer supported. Going forward, you must convert WebKit plug-ins to Netscape-style plug-ins or Safari Extensions.

Safari supports the latest web standards, which may serve your needs more easily than a plug-in. If you are developing a plug-in to embed audio or video, you can instead take advantage of Safari’s support for the <audio> and <video> tags in HTML5. For more information, see the Safari HTML5 Audio and Video Guide in the Safari Reference Library.

Client-side storage is available in Safari through the Storage and SQL APIs, also defined in HTML5. If you are developing a rich user interface, Safari supports CSS transforms, transitions, and animations. More information on Safari and CSS can be found in Safari CSS Reference in the Safari Reference Library.

Organization of This Document

The topic contains the following articles:

About Web Browser Plug-ins describes the benefits of web browser plug-ins and how they are integrated into common browsers. It also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of both plug-in models, and how to deploy plug-ins on computers and web sites.

Creating Plug-ins with the Netscape API describes how to use the Netscape plug-in architecture to develop and deploy web browser plug-ins across multiple browsers and platforms.

Creating Legacy Plug-ins with Cocoa and WebKit describes the legacy WebKit-based plug-in architecture.

See Also

There are lots of helpful resources available to guide you through plug-in development.

Mozilla’s Plug-ins Project discusses the cross-browser Netscape API and also includes lots of sample code.

Plug-in Detections discusses how to tune your web content to detect plug-ins (if registration did not solve the problem).

Read the WebKit Objective-C Framework Reference for the full WebKit plug-in reference and the reference detailing the WebKit-scripting environment bridge.

Read the WebKit Objective-C Programming Guide for tips on good WebKit application design and how the web scripting environment can access WebKit methods and properties (and vice versa).

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