Extensions

XPCOM - It’s a place most XUL application and extension developers would rather avoid. There are times when XPCOM components are needed and developers have to bite-the-bullet. A few examples are commandline handlers, autocomplete implementations and the new custom query processors for XUL templates. If you’re lucky, you can use JavaScript to implement the XPCOM component.

Joey Minta has put together some API ideas for STEEL, a FUEL-like library for Thunderbird. I share David Ascher’s feelings that such a library would be a fantastic way to simplify Thunderbird extension development and get more people building Thunderbird extensions.

XUL, the XML-based UI language used in Mozilla products, has supported templating for a while now. Unfortunately, the only datasources you could use to drive the templates were RDF-based datasources. This has been a hurdle for some, including me, to really dive into XUL templates.

ActiveState is ready to start rocking the OpenKomodo project. They have everything ready to go:

Yesterday, I did my best to convince a bunch of smart, young developers that I was an expert at building extensions for Mozilla applications. It must have worked, they didn’t heckle me out of the room. Seneca’s Dave Humphrey and Chris Tyler have a great group of students working on Mozilla (and other Open Source) projects. I have been impressed with the types of projects the Seneca students completed in the past. This group of students and projects are just as impressive. I got a chance to talk to a few students after the presentation and hope to continue working with the group via IRC or anytime I happen to be at Seneca (like next week).

I have been meaning to post this for a while now, so its kinda old news. The APNG format for animated PNG images is currently available in Firefox 3 alpha releases. I saw that the latest Opera 9.5 alpha releases also support APNG (look under Other Changes). I am glad to see support for the new format getting some traction.

I have been working on a small project that ports Python’s ctypes functionality to Mozilla’s XPCOM system. For those unfamiliar with ctypes, its a Python module that allows developers to declare and call exported methods from binary/shared libraries. Developers can then wrap these binary calls in pure Python.