Mozilla

I recently accepted a job offer from Mozilla Corporation. Today, I start working as an extension evangelist / consultant - helping extension developers be more successful, productive and happy.

Recent posts from Zach Lipton and Robert O’Callahan share a common theme: Give web applications better integration into the desktop.

In the spirit of “you can never have too many”, I thought it would be a good idea to document my process of creating an XPCOM object in C++. XPCOM is Mozilla’s cross platform component object model, similar to Microsoft’s COM technology. XPCOM components can be implemented in C, C++, and JavaScript, and can be used from C, C++, and JavaScript. That means you can call JavaScript methods from C++ and vice versa.

Really interesting news regarding the Mozilla Platform. Eudora is being rebuilt on the Thunderbird core. The project is called Penelope. It is definitely a good shot in the arm for both Thunderbird and the Mozilla Platform.

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.

My quest to build a basic desktop application using XUL continues. Last time I installed XULRunner and built a very simple, bare-bones test application. This time I want to add some of the things common to a desktop application UI:

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.