Posts

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:

Joey Minta has put together some API ideas for STEEL, a FUEL-like library for Thunderbird. I share David Ascher’s feelings that such a library would be a fantastic way to simplify Thunderbird extension development and get more people building Thunderbird extensions.

XUL, the XML-based UI language used in Mozilla products, has supported templating for a while now. Unfortunately, the only datasources you could use to drive the templates were RDF-based datasources. This has been a hurdle for some, including me, to really dive into XUL templates.