Practices

I have been lucky to build software products for a few different companies, each with a distinct culture. It’s help me form opinions about people, tools and processes that make teams effective at shipping software products.

Lots of discussion going on recently about the affect of 6 week development cycles on binary XPCOM components in add-ons. I don’t want to re-hash those discussions, but Daniel Glazman brought up an interesting point in a comment on Wladimir’s post. Wladimir was suggesting binary component developers start moving to js-ctypes. Daniel pointed out that there are two classes of binary XPCOM components:

By now you are probably aware that desktop Firefox has moved to a rapid release system, utilizing several new code repositories and a focused strategy for creating releases in a timely manner.

If you’re serious about improving your application’s performance, you need to collect data. At Mozilla, we use Talos. The Mobile team has been using Talos to track performance on Maemo (using N810 and N900) devices for a few years and recently started tracking Android (using Tegras) as well. Here are a few of the metrics we track:

Okay, maybe my tongue-in-cheek, roasting of Ryan Stewart didn’t go over so well. But, at one point in the post/rant I mention working on a project called WebRunner that, IMO, is a competitor to Adobe AIR. I, unsurprisingly, feel that WebRunner does a better job complementing the Web and is a better fit for web applications in general. Both systems allow developers to run rich internet applications (defined as you wish) on the desktop. That’s in itself is both novel and interesting to many developers. However, I think WebRunner and AIR are suited to slightly different applications.

Firefox 3’s offline capabilities have been getting some attention lately: Chris Double’s post on porting Zimbra to use offline shows-off the potential. Robert O’Callahan and John Resig give details on the different pieces of the capabilities, namely: Offline Cache, Offline Events and DOMStorage.

I put together a simple XUL validator based on the ideas in my last post. There is a primitive front end where you can put XUL into a textarea and validate it. The validator is completely client-side JavaScript with a simple JSON rules file. You can view the source and the rules from the validator “Tests” page.