For those add-on developers out there wondering what changes need to be made to Adblock Plus to support Prism, here is the patch. Wladimir does a great job keeping the code clean. He also worked around a bug in Prism 0.9 that has been fixed on our trunk.

Lucky Disasters has also been collecting some useful information for Prism add-on developers.

Next, I started working on adding the same support to Fennec. I hit a snag because of changes in Mozilla 1.9.1 to support new types of testing. I made a patch (reviewed and waiting to land) that makes things work again. We are hoping that some of the tweaks needed by Dave’s patch can be rolled into the mainline Mochitests system.

Now that I have some experience under my belt, I plan to add some docs no MDC. I also plan to add the necessary code templates to XUL Explorer and FizzyPop application generators, so anyone making a new XUL application automatically get Mochitest support.

Thanks Dave

One problem we had with Developer Days was trying to figure out where “concentrations” of Mozilla developers, or people interested in Mozilla development, were located. It made it hard to plan locations for Developer Day events. Recently, someone on IRC asked about Mozilla User Groups and if there was anyone located near him (Rayleigh/Durham area in this case). I couldn’t give him any definitive answer, but it did get us talking about how we could start collection information about where Mozilla developers are located and if they meet periodically. The only such group I know of is the NorthWestMozDev group.

What other groups are out there? Perhaps using Meetup might be a good way to can track of various Mozilla groups. There are already Mozilla and XUL categories on Meetup. Hopefully, this could help other interested developers meet people and get involved with Mozilla. It can also help Mozilla find great locations to have Developer Day events.

You don’t need to be a hard core Mozilla developer. Developer Days are focused on anybody with an interest in Mozilla projects, products or technologies.

Runtimes
SDKs
Source tarball

For those interested in the mobile versions of XULRunner, nightly builds of XULRunner for Maemo can be found here. The mobile tinderbox is also up and running.

Want to get started building XULRunner applications? We have an article for that.

This crowd was very Mozilla savvy and many had at least experimented with building XULRunner applications. So, instead of my normal slide deck, I went with a “walk-through” of using the Mozilla build system to create a XULRunner application. I did the same with setting up an auto-updating XULRunner application. I think the Mozilla build system is something any XULRunner developer should learn and setting up auto-updating always seems to frustrate developers.

The talk went very well. Thanks to Robert Kaiser for helping me fill in some blanks. We had some good discussion and I could have spent a lot more time covering some of the smaller details. I think I might look into expanding this “walk-through” format.

Another topic we talked about was the potential of XULRunner on mobile devices. Many developers are excited to see XULRunner become available for mobile platforms. The ability to move XUL applications from desktops to mobile devices is fairly powerful. Fennec, for example, runs just fine on any supported XULRunner platform - without any changes.

Extending this mobile browser is now fully operational!

I got the feeling that the designers and developers thought that using so much HTML in XUL was, in some way, anti-XUL. NO WAY! It’s my opinion that using HTML in this way - enhancing a user interface - shows the power of XUL. The ability to seamlessly mix different markup languages is quite impressive. How many other UI markup languages can do that?

The use of HTML, SVG and specifically, <canvas> in XUL is not new. You’ll find many examples of add-ons and applications that go beyond XUL to create elements of the UI. XUL itself uses HTML as a foundation for implementing widgets.

Here are some examples from previous posts on using HTML, SVG and <canvas> in XUL. Start spicing up your XUL UI today.

A big thanks to Mel and Chris for taking the time to support Fennec, even in it’s alpha condition.

Yes, Fennec’s overall size is a bit big for a mobile browser. But it is a full blown browser, with all the web support of a desktop browser. It also supports the same add-on system as desktop Mozilla applications, like Firefox, Thunderbird and Songbird.

There’s another benefit of having XULRunner installed on the device: Any other XUL-based application can use the XULRunner runtime, without needing to install anything extra. Applications like Chatzilla, XULMine, XULExplorer and Prism could be installed and launched using the shared XULRunner. Keep in mind, Fennec thinks it “owns” that XULRunner and will update it when it needs too.

So, if you installed Fennec A1 and want to create your own XUL-based apps on a mobile device, you have an up-to-date runtime to build on. Here’s a simple way to get started with XULRunner (on mobile too).

I also plan to hang around the Prism session, presented by Matt Gertner. Prism has some cool features brewing. I hope we get a new release (with samples) out soon.