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Added life-cycle of a plugin
==Plugins in Gecko==
* Plugins increases functionality of Gecko-based browsers. Examples of this includes embedded viewers for Flash/Shockwave and Adobe Acrobat PDFs.
* Plug-ins are dynamic code modules that are associated with one or more MIME types.
* Plugins are dynamically loaded.
* In order to develop plugins for the Gecko engine, you'll need the plugin SDK, which is located in the Mozilla source under mozilla/modules/plugin/tools/sdk. Samples and source code can be viewed via LXR: http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/modules/plugin/tools/sdk/
==Life-cycle of a Plugin==
Unlike a software application, the plugin is complete controlled by the web page that calls it. When the browser starts, it checks for a list of plugins in the plugin directory and registers each plugin for its MIME type. When a user opens a web page containing embedded data that requires a plugin to view, Gecko responds by doing the following actions:
* checks for a plugin with a matching MIME type
* load the plugin code into memory
* initialize the plugin
* create an instance of the plugin
In short, Gecko will load multiple instances of the same plugin on the same page if it contains several embedded data of the same MIME. When the window leaves the page or closes the window, the plugin instance will be deleted. Once the last instance of the plugin is deleted, the code will be unloaded from memory.
=Resources=
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Gecko_Plugin_API_Reference
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Gecko_Plugin_API_Reference:Plug-in_Basics
http://www.herts.ac.uk/ltdu/technology/what_is_a_plugin.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugin
