Extensions

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.

Big news for those of you following Firefox 3 development. Places, the new backend implementation for bookmarks and page history, landed last night and will be ready for Firefox 3a5. Here’s an overview from the Places developers page:

Its been a while since XUL Explorer has been updated. However, I have been using it more than ever and I have been keeping a list of things that I’d like to see added. The good news is XUL Explorer is now hosted in Mozilla’s SVN repository. More good news is we created a wiki page to help track and guide development. Even more good news is that Cesar Oliviera has joined Developer Relations as a summer intern to help work on developer tools.

ClickOnce is a Microsoft deployment mechanism for WinForms and WPF applications that works great in Internet Explorer. Thanks to an extension, you can also get ClickOnce applications to work from Firefox too. FFClickOnce was created by James Dobson. Check out the homepage where James describes what it does and how it works very nicely.

FUEL 0.1 landed on the trunk yesterday. Progress had slowed since the last update mainly due to John and I having so many other balls in the air. For those intrepid enough to play with 0.1, you can use the API on the wiki and the code in the unit tests as examples.

How to create a rich text or HTML WYSIWYG type editor in Mozilla has come up a few times so I thought a post was in order. Mozilla has a rich text editing system (called Midas) and an API similar to Internet Explorer’s. Mozilla, like Internet Explorer, supports the ability to make an entire document editable by setting the designMode property of the document object. Once in design mode, the document can be manipulated using various DHTML commands.

After getting sidetracked for a while, I have finally made some progress on XUL Explorer. I have been tinkering around with the editor and integrating the XUL validator. I also reorganized the code a little so I could support sidebars in the future.