Tokyo Developer Conference – FUEL & XULRunner

I was a co-presenter for two sessions at the Tokyo developer conference held a few weeks ago:

  • FUEL & Chrome JavaScript Libraries (slides) : I presented with Gomita-san (picture), a Japanese extension developer who had a detailed presentation on the ways FUEL could help extension developers. We both handled a short Q&A session at the end.
  • Building Applications with XULRunner (slides) : I presented with Taro Matsuzawa (picture), a leader of the MozillaGumi community. Taro’s presentation was about localization issues with XULRunner applications. In the process, he showed how to convert an extension to a XULRunner application. It was a cool dashboard-style, transparent clock widget. We, also, did a short Q&A session at the end.

A couple things I came away with from the conference:

  • The Japanese Mozilla community is very strong, passionate and knowledgeable. Everyone appeared to have a lot of fun and the presenters certainly enjoyed showing off their extensions. I saw a developer build an extension in 3 minutes from scratch – with the help of some well planned editor keyboard macros.
  • Unsurprisingly, Japanese extension developers have the same wishlist for FUEL as any other extension developers: support in toolkit, support in Firefox 2 and support for files/streams, clipboard, … 🙂
  • XULRunner is relatively new to the Japanese scene. There have been some experiments and articles, but it definitely has some room to grow. With the strength and size of the extension development community, I would expect to see growth in Japanese XULRunner development.