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Yes, there has been a lot of talk about the Mozilla platform lately. This is to be expected considering the hype generated around Sliverlight and Apollo platforms. Most of the discussion is coming from well meaning developers, using (or trying to use) the Mozilla platform to build products. Developers who want to see the open Mozilla platform flourish in the face of closed competitors. I have a special interest in the platform too, its how I ended up working at Mozilla, so I also want to see it succeed.

From Mike Shaver (back after a *cough* hiatus):

Mozilla Japan is putting together a big Mozilla developer conference on June 16th in Tokyo. The wiki page has some details and a draft schedule. This conference will be bigger than the recent developer days in Mountain View and Boston. Japan seems to have a large Firefox extension development community and I am looking forward to working with them.

From Dare Obasanjo:

Its been a while since XUL Explorer has been updated. However, I have been using it more than ever and I have been keeping a list of things that I’d like to see added. The good news is XUL Explorer is now hosted in Mozilla’s SVN repository. More good news is we created a wiki page to help track and guide development. Even more good news is that Cesar Oliviera has joined Developer Relations as a summer intern to help work on developer tools.

I was part of a session at CHI 2007 on Thursday titled “User Interface Description Languages: XUL & XAML.” The session covered some of the benefits of declarative UIs, especially with respect to the designer/developer iterative process. Scott Stanfield and myself demonstrated building UIs in XAML and XUL, respectively. We tried to show how easy it was to create and modify UI prototypes. Also, how the prototype markup could be used by developers to create the production UI, even while designers tweaked pieces along the way.

ClickOnce is a Microsoft deployment mechanism for WinForms and WPF applications that works great in Internet Explorer. Thanks to an extension, you can also get ClickOnce applications to work from Firefox too. FFClickOnce was created by James Dobson. Check out the homepage where James describes what it does and how it works very nicely.