[PLUG] Mozilla development?

Alice Corbin ali at axian.com
Wed Apr 14 08:03:01 UTC 2004


On Tue, Apr 13, 2004 at 07:17:42PM -0700, Matt Alexander wrote:
> Has anyone here done any application development using Mozilla and XUL?

Yes.  The first bit I did was just as a training exercise.  The results
are now published at 

	http://www.hevanet.com/acorbin/xul/top.xul

I also did a couple of paying projects, writing GUIs for kiosks.
> 
> Pros?  

'Tis cool.  We were replacing GUIs written in html, and XUL is much more
powerful.  It has a bunch of widgets available and it's easy to lay out.
It's faster than html, mostly because you can change and redraw a single
component instead of refreshing the whole screen.  And it's designed to
work nicely with stylesheets and localization.

A big selling point is its cross-platform-ness.  Provided that mozilla
is installed on the machine, any XUL GUI will work anywhere.

> Cons?

It's still fairly new.  It's not as mature as other widget sets, such
as gtk or qt.

It's still fairly new.  Printed documentation is either non-existant
or hopelessly out-of-date.  I bought the O'Reilly book for the overview,
but learned most of the details from the web, from:

http://www.xulplanet.com/
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&group=netscape.public.dev.xul
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&group=netscape.public.mozilla.xpfe
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&group=netscape.public.mozilla.xpcom

(This was a year or more ago.  There might be better docs now.)
	
You pretty much have to learn javascript to provide the functionality.
Theoretically, you could use a different scripting language, but so far
everything (like all of mozilla) has been done in javascript.

Ali




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