Javascript

Its been a couple months since I released RichDraw. At the time I was looking around at the state of browser-based drawing and diagraming tools. Most were Java or ActiveX based. Now, I am finding lots of pure Javascript API’s and tools.

Last time I covered some simple XUL for creating windows, menus and toolbars. This time I’ll look at dialogs, your own and common OS dialogs too. Dialogs are pretty fundamental to a desktop application. Certain types of dialogs are used over and over. So much so that the OS can provide a default implementation. File open and save are good examples. Whenever possible, it is a good idea to reuse these ’native’ dialogs so users get a consistent experience across applications.

I want to build a simple XUL-based Windows desktop application. If you’re going to build a XUL-based desktop application, you’ll probably need to install XULRunner. In this post, I try to get XULRunner installed and make sure it runs a bare-bones application.

After a short break, I am back to working with the Mozilla platform (XUL, JavaScript & XPCOM). I want to begin exploring the platform by building a basic desktop application using XULRunner. Given that Firefox, Thunderbird and the rest of the Mozilla suite is written using the platform, it a safe bet that it can be used to build a basic application. However, I know nearly nothing of the Mozilla platform, so I need to start somewhere.

Rich text editing is a feature that is finding it’s way into many new web applications. It’s becoming a feature that users can’t live without. We are also starting to see some graphical editing applications. In an effort to satisfy a potential, future, demand to have graphical editing everywhere (it could happen), I created a Javascript component called RichDraw.

I made some changes to the IESVG behavior. I am trying to get better feature coverage without making the rendering too slow. I have been testing the code using some SVG images from different places, trying to figure out what parts of SVG seem to be more important than others. Recents chanegs include:

Inspired by Emil’s emulation of the canvas tag in IE, I put together a simple SVG emulation behavior for IE. As with Emil’s code, I am making use of Internet Explorer’s VML support. The behavior will walk the SVG element structure and attempt to convert to appropriate VML elements. It’s far from complete, but it does a decent job. Supported features include: