Status
Cesar and I have been working on stuff from the feature plan. The XUL Explorer trunk has support for DOM Inpsector and Venkman (JavaScript debugger). Future releases will bundle those extensions with XUL Explorer. Cesar has a patch for adding extension testing support. I have the basics of an extension generation wizard in place. Both of those features will be in the next release too.
It was pretty nice to be able to use Venkman to debug some of the extension wizard code.
Paul Medlock has been sending in some patches too. He sent in a XUL formatter to keep the source code pretty in the editor. He also sent in some intellisense-like features for XUL. We are running into some of the limitations of the Mozilla editor in the process.
Contributing
Contributing to XUL Explorer just got easier. A bugzilla component for XUL Explorer was added recently. You can now use bugzilla to file bugs or submit patches. Here are some useful links for contributing:
Feedback, bugs and patches welcome.
Hey Mark
This is all extremely exciting. Can we take a peek at a binary?
Great work everyone.
Looks nice.
I had a brief chat with Mitchell Baker tonight here at TheFarm. I mentioned that I had participated in the moon.MozPad IRC meeting in the morning, and hoped to convey the sense that it’s not just Valley startups who want to build apps off of the “MoonPad” but hobbyist hackers — HacketyHack for example — and academic researchers too.
When I hoped to say that perhaps one day MoonPad-based development might be as easy as Ruby or Rails, she countered that Client vs Server is usually a big divide. I think that has often been true, but it’s interesting to see how Javascript has moved slightly into serverland (GOOG’s acquisition of JotSpot and Markaby-style JS generation on the server) and server technologies such as Python and Ruby are moving towards the client end (Silverlight, IronPython/Ruby).
I also pitched the idea of a MoonCamp to Mitchell as well (which you said you had thought about), wondering if MozCo could attract non-corporate developers, hobbyists and researchers, and take these folks as the end-user for once. Would it help for MozCo to see the end-user developer pain first hand?
I went to lunch with DHH last week, and during the lecture he gave before that, he talked about the creator of Ruby, Matz, took great care in how the language feels, and tried to make programmers happy. DHH tried to do the same with Rails for the server-side, and I think that’s been a great success. Can we do the same for the (future) client-side? Hiring John Resig is a great start, but there’s plenty a ways to go before we hit this so-called “Moon” 🙂
~L
This is awesome!