Mozilla

We have been putting out the call for extension developers to start the process of updating their extension to workin Firefox 3. It’s never fun when your extension breaks because of changes in Firefox, but everyone wants to make the platform better. In doing so, we had to break some eggs.

Looks like I am headed to Brussels for FOSDEM this year. I was invited to present on Mozilla Prism, along with some coverage of new things in Firefox 3. Which reminds me that I need to blog more about Prism.

Ok, so the sky isn’t falling yet, but now is a great time for extension developers to get those extensions updated to Firefox 3. The crew at addons.mozilla.org have a bit of information concerning the update for extensions hosted there. The Mozilla Developer Center has a page dedicated to the new features and changes in Firefox 3.

I have talked a bit about the new built-in datasources (XML and SQL) developers can use with XUL templating (guide and tutorial). I wanted to wrapup my little foray into XUL template datasources by also talking about custom datasources.

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.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again - Seneca Rocks! For those of you that don’t know, Seneca College in Toronto (Seneca @ York specifically) has a program where students work with Mozilla technology during the semester. They learn to build big projects like Firefox and Thunderbird, learn about the underlying frameworks, customize the source code and make their own extensions. They also get to participate in the project itself - working on documentation, interacting with other project members and even helping other developers get into Mozilla. Its a great thing to see in action.

Zoho’s recent blog post about why they used JavaScript and not Flash when building their offline version of Zoho Writer has led to some interesting but somewhat predictable responses [1] & [2]. I could have fallen into a predictable (but not necessarily interesting) response myself, but didn’t. Until I saw Ryan Stewart post the following: