Xul

A while ago I posted about getting XULRunner builds to coincide with Firefox milestones. Work has been moving ahead on the goal. In fact, we have XULRunner 1.9 RC2 binary runtimes and SDKs available for testing. If you use XULRunner, or want to use XULRunner, you should grab these builds and give them a spin. Let us know (file bugs) if you see something wrong.

Shaver and I have been talking about getting a decent mechanism for remote debugging a JavaScript session. I have been looking at JSSH. It’s a bit dated, but a great little Firefox/Mozilla extension that adds a huge amount of external flexibility, control and extensibility. The Watir-based web testing system for Firefox (called FireWatir) uses JSSH to control the current Firefox browsing session. The big downside to JSSH is that it has binary components, so you need to build it across platforms and Gecko versions. Yuck!

Mozilla’s Mobile group has been hard at work getting the Mozilla platform running on some mobile devices. Recently, Brad Lassey posted about getting XULRunner working on Nokia’s N800/N810 (Maemo) Internet tablets. He linked to a XULRunner binary and showed some XUL-based applications running on an N810.

Good news for developers who are building applications on the Mozilla platform, XULRunner in particular. The wheels are in motion to start creating XULRunner builds (runtime and SDK) that coincide with major Firefox milestones. I encourage interested developers to watch the bug to see how the discussion and plan evolves.

Firefox 3 is not even out the door, but work has started on the next refactoring of the Mozilla platform. Dubbed Mozilla 2 (FF3 is built on Mozilla 1.9), it is a chance to make lots of interesting, even scary, changes to the platform. For some background on Mozilla 2 go back and read Brendan’s post. Also, read the Mozilla 2 wiki pages.

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.

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.