Writing applications with XUL - not easy! [LWN.net]

Writing applications with XUL - not easy!

Posted Apr 15, 2004 13:50 UTC (Thu) by gerv (subscriber, #3376)
In reply to: Writing applications with XUL - not easy! by rwmj
Parent article: Mozilla Looking to Forge Alliances (MozillaZine)

The situation may have been partly as you describe a year ago, but:

1) "Rapid Application Development with Mozilla" rocks.

2) The edit/compile/debug cycle is actually really short - particularly as there's no "compile" step if you are just using JS/CSS/XUL/XBL. With the caches turned off, it's as quick as editing HTML and pressing Ctrl-R.

3) JavaScript is a highly suitable language for what the Mozilla Framework uses it for - binding front-ends to back-ends. This is not your web-page scrolling-text document.forms JavaScript; JavaScript is an excellent OO, weakly-typed language with some handy features (e.g. prototypes) you won't find in any other mainstream language.

4) The XUL and XBL syntaxes have been fixed since Mozilla 1.0. And you don't have to worry about change if you pick a stable version (1.4 or 1.7) and develop on that.

5) The platform is currently designed to be shipped with the app. See ActiveState Komodo for an example. We do have plans for a Runtime Environment usable by multiple apps, but that's a way off yet.

No platform is a cakewalk; all have a learning curve. But I think with the publication of RAD With Mozilla, we are in a position to compete.

Gerv

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Writing applications with XUL - not easy!

Posted Apr 15, 2004 13:57 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (guest, #5474) [Link]

Thanks for clarifying these points. As I said I'd dearly like to be able to write applications in XUL. It looks like I need to get the new book: RAD with Mozilla.

Rich.

Writing applications with XUL - not easy!

Posted Apr 15, 2004 14:05 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (guest, #5474) [Link]

Before you go and spring 20 quid for this book, it's available for free download here:

http://www.informit.com/content/downloads/perens/0131423436_pdf.zip

(I would give you the actual page which links to this content, but ironically that page doesn't render properly in Mozilla :-)

Writing applications with XUL - not easy!

Posted Apr 21, 2004 17:30 UTC (Wed) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link]

3) JavaScript is a highly suitable language for what the Mozilla Framework uses it for - binding front-ends to back-ends. This is not your web-page scrolling-text document.forms JavaScript; JavaScript is an excellent OO, weakly-typed language with some handy features (e.g. prototypes) you won't find in any other mainstream language.

Having learned tens of programming languages, I have finally found the one that has everything I need and is fun to program. And no, it is not JavaScript. Need I continue?

Here is yet another angle: I have a fairly large project that is written in a language that is neither C/C++, nor JavaScript. To use XUL in new GUI for this project, I'd have to add advanced JavaScript to the list of skills of my developers.